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Author Topic: Senseless words
Crane
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I need help filling in these blanks about words that mean a lack of a certain sense.

sight: dark -> blind
hearing: silent -> deaf
touch: _____ -> numb
smell: _____ ->______
taste: _____ ->______

I'm trying to avoid words like 'tasteless', 'odorless,' or 'insensate' I'm hoping for a word that can stand up for itself without containing the word for its opposite. For example, we don't have to create the word 'light-less' because we have a perfectly good word: 'dark.' Do these words that I'm looking for exist in English? If not, do other languages have these words? Do we have the words to talk about these things without referencing their opposites?


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Natej11
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Definitely a tricky question. You'd think such simple concepts would have words for them, but often words only appear when they're needed, which must mean they don't come up much .

sight: dark -> blind
hearing: silent -> deaf
touch: nerveless? -> numb
smell: acclimated? (smell, like all other senses, fades with constant exposure) musty? (the smell of a place where the air has hung still so long that all smells have dissipated) -> clogged? stuffed?
taste: bland, sustaining, tasteless? I've also heard food people weren't enjoying as "tasting like ashes" -> Completely at a loss here.


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Wordcaster
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I'd go with immaterial for touch.

Smell: odorless ->Anosmia

Taste: insipid -> ?


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Robert Nowall
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With taste, something is either sweet, bitter, sour, or salty. (There's said to be others, some disputed.)

I cribbed this off Wikipedia, so go there for further leads...


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MattLeo
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It would help if we knew precisely what you are trying to do. Are you looking to describe or denote?

If describe, then a mad-lib style prompt would help: "He forced himself to choke down the (adjective describing lack of flavor) emergency rations." Then we'd suggest "tasteless", "flavorless", "bland" or maybe "stale".

If you are looking for a word which denotes the lack of the _faculty_ of taste, the way "blindness" denotes lacking the faculty of sight, there is of course a medical term ("ageusia") but that conveys nothing to the average reader. You'd be better off saying "He'd lost his sense of taste" rather than "he had ageusia," just like you'd say "he was losing his hair" rather than "he had alopecia."

Specialists have jargon because it's pithy, though incomprehensible to outsiders. For a general audience you'll just need to eat the word count.


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Crane
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I don't have a specific use for these words that I'm searching for, yet (well maybe a budding story idea, but its just an embryo so I don't want to talk about it yet). I'm looking for word pairs that have the same relationship as dark and blind for the other senses. 'When you are blind you experience dark.' Or 'when you are in the dark you are blind,' for example. I'm just wondering why we don't have words like these for smell and taste, and seemingly only one of the words for feel? I wonder why we don't have a word for the kind of thing you can touch but only feel numbness? Perhaps we don't have these words because we don't actually have any objects that we can touch but not feel (sometimes we can't feel something but it has nothing to do with the object and all to do with our numb appendage). We don't have any objects that have no smell or no taste at all, and the condition we suffer from when we can't smell or taste are rare enough or non-critical enough that only medicine has bothered to come up with words for them. Even the medical word is literally indicating the lack of the sense (eg: anosmia, which is a wonderful new word for me, by the way: love it.) 'Blind' and 'deaf' aren't related to the words 'seeing' and 'hearing'; they're not negations of these words. If we were interacting with an alien who's primary sense was neither seeing nor hearing we might have to come up with English words for these concepts. I guess what I'm trying to do here is suss out if we do have these words, and if not, perhaps propose some to feed to this little embryo that's cooking in my head.
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posulliv
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Maybe we don't have common words for sense-states that we can't directly and unambiguously observe in others.

Seeing darkness and hearing silence are really just widely used metaphors. I know this because the great philosopher Bruce Springsteen assures me it is possible to be blinded by the light.


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MattLeo
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Well, why not branch out and include propioception?
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Brendan
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Dark and silent pertain to the absence of the phenomenon that is sensed (light and sound, respectively). The problem with the other three senses is that no single thing is sensed. Touch can be either pressure or temperature, and furthermore it has elements of difference measures as well as direct measures involved (i.e. you feel hot and cold due to the flow of heat from one object to another). With both smell and taste, the sense is effectively whether the molecules match a list of specified molecules that we sense. So an absence of smell could mean either the molecules aren't there, or the molecules that are there aren't on the list that can be sensed. Therefore, the absence of odor may be vapid or vacuous, depending on the context.


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Crane
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These comments are valuable and have certainly helped my thinking on the matter. However, I crave words for these things. I think that our vocabulary can limit the way we think. Before Robert Heinlein taught us the word 'grok,' few of us (or at least I didn't) ever paused to consider whether or not we were grokking something. The words 'deaf' and 'blind' mean more than just our ability to see and hear; they also mean the attention that we are paying to these senses. For example, "She is deaf to my protests." or "He has a blind spot when it comes to his children." If I want to pay more attention to my sense of smell, it might help to have a word that means 'oblivious to smells.' Particularly smells! We don't think about smell as much as our other senses, but its psychological importance is starting to emerge. We know that its critical for memory and apparently also for forming social bonds (the way babies smell or the way lovers smell, for example seems to directly impact our brain and hormone chemistry, from what I've read).
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Kathleen Dalton Woodbury
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Crane, you might be interested in a book by Suzette Haden Elgin:
Try to Feel It My Way which, among other things, is about how we use different metaphors in our communications that may (or may not) relate to how we process the world.

Example, someone who processes visually may say things like, "I think I see what you mean." and "Look at it this way." Someone who processes audially may say things like, "I hear you." or "Listen to this." And someone who processes by touch might say things like, "I don't have a handle on that." or "Can you grasp what I'm saying?" She has many examples, and it's a great book for characterization ideas based on processing tendencies, by the way.

By the way, I have a friend who, by Elgin's book, must process by taste and/or smell, because when she's excited about something, she says things like, "What a delicious idea!"


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Crane
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Thank you, Kathleen. Looks fascinating. Its not available as an ebook, so I'll look for it when I go ashore.
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