1) Rivka Galchen’s New Yorker article (archived) on pain and attempts to control it is well worth your while, but it shows up at LH because of a word in its first sentence: “Pain might flicker, flash, prickle, drill, lancinate, pinch, cramp, tug, scald, sear, or itch.” Lancinate! I don’t remember seeing it before, but I like it; it sounds like a word that means what it means, which is (in the words of M-W) ‘pierce, stab, lacerate.’ It’s from “Latin lancinatus, past participle of lancinare to lacerate; akin to lacer mangled.” The OED (entry from 1901) has these citations:
1603 Blacke hel-mettal..to excoriat and lancinate a deuil.
S. Harsnett, Declaration of Popish Impostures 911623 Lancinate, to thrust through.
H. Cockeram, English Dictionarie1876 How had she lancinated the wound, already, as she could see, quick and bleeding!
Overmatched vol. I. vii. 117
Once again I have to chide the OED for leaving the author of a novel unmentioned; in this case there’s some excuse for it, since Overmatched was published anonymously, but with the aid of the internet it’s the work of an instant to discover it’s by Herman Ludolph Prior. If they didn’t know that in 1901, couldn’t they have at least said it was by Anonymous?
2) I recently ran across the word esemplastic and realized I’d seen it off and on throughout my life and could never remember its meaning, so I’m posting it in the hope that that will fix it in my mind. M-W defines it as “shaping or having the power to shape disparate things into a unified whole” and adds this note:
“Unusual and new-coined words are, doubtless, an evil; but vagueness, confusion, and imperfect conveyance of our thoughts, are a far greater,” wrote English poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge in Biographia Literaria, 1817. True to form, in that same work, he assembled esemplastic by melding the Greek phrase es hen, meaning “into one,” with plastic to fulfill his need for a word that accurately described the imagination’s ability to shape disparate experiences into a unified whole (e.g., the poet’s imaginative ability to communicate a variety of images, sensations, emotions, and experiences in the unifying framework of a poem). The verb intensify was another word that Coleridge was compelled to mint while writing Biographia.
The OED (entry from 1891) says:
< Greek ἐς into + ἕν, neuter of ἕις + πλαστικός, < πλάσσειν to mould: a word irregularly formed by Coleridge, and probably suggested to him by the German ineinsbildung forming into one.
Citations:
1817 On the imagination, or esemplastic power.
S. T. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria vol. I. xiii. 2851838 Nor I trust will Coleridge’s favorite word, esemplastic..ever become current.
J. C. Hare & A. W. Hare, Guesses at Truth (ed. 2) 1st Series 2751879 The unifying—or if I may use the expression, esemplastic—power of the imagination over the many subordinate truths.
F. W. Farrar, Life & Work of St. Paul vol. II. x. lii. 488
And if you want more there’s a whole Wikipedia article, for some reason.
It is indeed an interesting article. It reminded me of my experiences treating people with leprosy, a much commoner cause of the curse of not being able to feel pain.
Starting an only tangentially-relevant hare: I noticed this at the end
It occurs to me that this metaphor is actually culturally dependent. Physical pain in Kusaal is expressed with zab “hurt” (which also means “fight”), which seems never to be used for emotional distress.
Looking in Naden’s dictionary for an example to disprove my impression, I actually discovered among the example citations
On sun o zug la ka pin’il kaasig, li da ka’anɛ niŋgbiŋ zabir yɛla, amaa sʋnsa’aŋ.
“When he hung his head he started weeping, not because of physical pain but heartbreak.”
“Physical pain” here renders niŋgbiŋ zabir, literally “body pain”, and “heartbreak” translates sʋnsa’aŋ, literally “heart-spoiling.” (“Heartbreak” is over-literal: the word really means “sorrow”, and doesn’t have the particular associations of our “heartbreak.”)
I don’t think the niŋgbiŋ “body” in niŋgbiŋ zabir is in fact there to specify that the pain is physical rather than mental: it’s to specify that zabir means “pain” rather than “fighting”, which is the usual sense of that deverbal noun when unmodified.
The general word for non-physical suffering is tɔɔg, literally “bitterness.”
What happens in other non-SAE languages?
Defining “lancinate” as “pierce, stab, lacerate” bothers me, since the first two are similar in meaning to each other but not to the third. To lacerate is “to tear or rend roughly : wound jaggedly” (Merriam-Webster). But Latin “lancinare” is also apparently about tearing, not piercing, so I guess English “lancinate” may have started out as a synonym (and relative) of “lacerate” whose meaning was influenced but its resemblance to “lance”.
Yes, I think the existence of “lance” is what makes the verb feel so right.
1603 Blacke hel-mettal..to excoriat and lancinate a deuil.
S. Harsnett, Declaration of Popish Impostures
Black hell-metal! Excoriating devils! Popish impostures! Why is this book not trending on Amazon?
These are all uttered by Captain Haddock, in The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Maister Tintin, of the Low Countreys, Writer.
DE: Surely diabetic neuropathy is commoner than leprosy?
True. But leprosy is commoner than congenital insensitity to pain.
(The grim potential effects of diabetic neuropathy also overlap a lot with the grim potential effects of peripheral vasculopathy.)
There was a terrible outbreak of leprosy among North American teenagers in the summer of 1997, occasioned by so many repeated listenings to “MMMBop.”