20141118.0628

As I was in the shower this morning, I considered the piece that I just read for my freelance work--another police procedural. My mind wandered thence to the idea of detection, but not so much in the police-sense as in the sensory sense, and I thought about the kinds of words that get used to describe sensory experience. They are raw and unmolded thoughts, more fit for the first part of this blog's title than the last, but because they fit it, I feel no compunction about offering them:

To say that we detect a thing is an accurate statement, but broad (for it obscures the means of detection) and somewhat sterile (it evokes techno-arcane scanning devices that work at long distances or at very small scales, neither of which translates well into human experience). It is a vague word, a word used when other words do not quite fit--and it does not fit well, itself. It is, in a sense, a too-large jacket; it covers what needs covering, but it hangs oddly and looks strange. Perhaps there is something beneath it that should not be seen...

Yet other words for senses have problems, as well. To say, for instance, that we feel a thing may be accurate, and it does make more visceral the sensory experience, tying to a shared sensation. (Except for lepers.) But it also has overtones of the non-serious, the hallucinatory, the surreal; it is difficult to verify that a thing is felt or that it has been felt, and because much that cannot otherwise be perceived is called "feeling," it may or may not be trustworthy.

Smelling, seeing, and tasting seem to me to be more accurate for what we tend to call "detection." As I have seen it used, "detection" involves identifying small particles of things amid many others or amid empty space, and smelling, seeing, and tasting all do that. Tasting has a particularly intimate association--there is something about the work of the mouth that makes for peculiar closeness--but seeing and smelling do not. And, frankly, smelling does not get enough attention (possibly because it is not the most acute human sense, but I am not up enough on the research in that line to be sure). Perhaps it would be fitting to say that the sensors "smelled" the thing rather than simply "sensed" it, as the latter term has even more surrealist connotations than does "felt." I know that anthropomorphization rankles, and that to ascribe biological characteristics to the non-biological goes too far in that direction...

As I note, the thoughts are raw and unformed, more fitting of ravings than of lucid prose. But there is something to consider in the way we use the words we use.