you dig up my liver, addendum

20 Awesomely Untranslatable Words from Around the World.  I am particularly fond of l'appel du vide, which describes the instinctive urge to jump from high places. Maybe I'm up in the night, but who hasn't experienced that? Sometimes English is starkly inadequate.

you dig up my liver

• People everywhere tend to describe powerful emotions metaphorically in terms of a part of the body. But in which part of the body and with what sensations people's emotions manifest themselves rather depends upon which language they speak.


• Botox causes impairment in the grokking of negative emotions? The source article is yet to be published in Psychological Science, but here's a masses-friendly scoop in (urp) Psychology Today.


• Having experienced the usefulness of temporary Stoicism, while acknowledging that it has been a tool rather than a preferred state of affairs, I am nonetheless surprised at some of my own internal railing at Nussbaum's arguments. Nussbaum here counters an age-old view espoused by Stoics, Christians and Kantians alike: emotions are disruptive and subversive to reason, they arise from parochial needs and interests and therefore the life well lived is the life in which the things of this world are left behind for a higher sphere beyond accident, pain and desire. On the contrary, Nussbaum writes, human beings enter the world dependent on objects beyond their control, most notably their mothers, and emotional development is a response to this fact....In her ''neo-Stoicism,'' the pain and partiality of emotion are a value-laden mode of thinking that must be accepted if we are to create a just and compassionate world.


• Babies: Cute little blobs of potential, or active participants in relationship?

thanks, b.u.