This is quoted as part of a well-written, thought-provoking item about the neuroscience of pain.
“Physical pain does not simply resist language but actively destroys it.” (Elaine Scarry, 1985, The Body in Pain.)
The Neuroscience of Pain: The New Yorker
For me, the piece provides some perspectives on matters discussed here such as perspective and cultural analogies and how they might overlap with FWR topics. And the sense that some topics not only resist language that makes sense to some people but actually destroys it and the ability to communicate usefully about it.
"The self-reported nature of pain scores leads, inevitably, to their accuracy being challenged. “To have great pain is to have certainty,” Elaine Scarry wrote. “To hear that another person has pain is to have doubt.” That doubt opens the door to stereotyping and bias. The 2014 edition of the textbook Nursing: A Concept-Based Approach to Learning warned practitioners that Native Americans “may pick a sacred number when asked to rate pain,” and that the validity of self-reports will likely be affected by the fact that Jewish people “believe that pain must be shared” and black people “believe suffering and pain are inevitable.” Last year, the book’s publisher, Pearson, announced that it would remove the offending passage from future editions...`'
I confess that I found this charming:
"Meanwhile, as the historian Joanna Bourke has shown, in her book The Story of Pain attempts to translate the McGill Pain Questionnaire into other languages have revealed the extent to which cultural context shapes language, which, in turn, shapes perception. In mid-century Montreal, Melzack’s talkative diabetic might have described a migraine as lacerating or pulsing, but the Sakhalin Ainu traditionally rated the intensity of pounding headaches in terms of the animal whose footsteps they most resembled: a bear headache was worse than a musk-deer headache. (If a headache was accompanied by a chill, it was described with an analogy to sea creatures.)`'.