Itch: A little to the left!

Yes, yes! Right there! Oh. My. God!!

Photo by Stephanie LeBlanc on Unsplash

I’ve had this persistent itch on my back for a while now, and it’s in one of those awkward spaces that I can just about sort of reach if I sling my arm forcefully over my shoulder and stretch my fingers to their limit and - oh! - the relief when I get to it.

Our forebears got itches too, probably a lot more than we do thanks to their stubborn refusal to take warm showers every day, use soap, or slather themselves with the countless unguents, ointments, embrocations and balms with which we adorn our bathroom shelves today.

One reason we know they got itches is because Old English had a word, gicce, for the phenomenon, which it took it from West Germanic. Somewhere along the way the g disappeared and we ended up with the modern pronunciation.

It’s telling that one definition of gicce was a “skin inflammation caused by a burrowing mite”. And you thought your itch was nasty.

As English was busy erasing the g from gicce it was also doing something it often does - adding a figurative meaning to the word. By the 12th century, any niggling desire to do something such as slap the people talking loudly in the row behind you on Saturday night during Sarah Millican’s stand up comedy show that you paid a lot of money to see could also be called an itch, and a bloody difficult one to resist, let me tell you.

Figurative language is hardly unique to English. Aristotle, who you may have heard of, and the Roman rhetorician Quintilian, who you may not have, wrote extensively on the subject. In 1934, Irish scholar William Bedell Stanford published a modern classic on the subject called Greek Metaphor, Studies in Theory and Practice. And that’s just the tip of an enormous iceberg.

Umberto Eco, who writes many levels above my pay grade, described metaphor as “a source of scandal”. Either all language is metaphorical, he said, or it is a predictive, rule-bound system that limits what phrases are possible. If the former, he continued, it is impossible to speak of metaphors other than metaphorically. If the latter, it is impossible to describe metaphors other than tautologically (for example, “there is a metaphor every time something unexplainable happens which the users of a language perceive as a metaphor”).

How we cotton on to meaning when someone speaks figuratively has also exercised some very clever minds. Until the 1980s, the prevailing thought, called the standard pragmatic model, was that if someone told you “I’m going bananas” (say), you would first look for a literal interpretation and only seek a figurative one if the literal one didn’t make sense. Later research, however, showed that we understand figurative language just as quickly as we understand literal, making the model suspect.

About the same time the standard pragmatic model was being challenged, linguist Michael J Reddy pointed out that we speak about communication as if it works by one person passing a message along a conduit to another, whereupon the message is extracted intact and unchanged by the recipient. Of course communication is much messier than that - in Wikipedia’s words, “listeners assemble from their own mental states a partial replica of the speakers’,” - yet we persist in making statements like “I’m trying to get my message across” and “say what you mean”.

Thanks to work like Reddy’s, many linguists now reject any distinction between literal and figurative modes of language. It’s all metaphorical, they say.

Whether you agree with such an absolutist position or not, it’s certainly breathtaking how much everyday language we assume to be literal is, in fact, metaphorical. Time doesn’t literally pass, February’s not getting nearer, no one is ever in pain, you don’t have a headache and neither can it disappear, unhappy couples are not stuck, and that deadline you’re worried about missing doesn’t literally exist and neither could you literally miss it if it did.

Linguist George Lakoff makes another point: metaphors obey rules that are largely hidden from our view. Take, for example, the metaphor “father/mother of”, as in “Einstein is the father of modern physics”. For causation to be stated in terms of giving birth, says Lakoff, “the thing created must persist for a long time (as if it had a life)”. So while Einstein may be the father of modern physics, France the birthplace of Gothic architecture, and Patti Smith the mother of punk rock/poetry, you, my friend, are neither the father nor mother of that sumptuous poulet sauté alice you whipped up for dinner last night before it was unceremoniously devoured by your plebeian guests who wouldn’t know fine French cuisine from KFC.

But enough high-minded linguistic theory; the real subject here is my persistent itch and the greater question, “what makes us itch in the first place and how come we only get itchy in tiny spots, mostly, and not all over?”

According to one study, the reason we don’t itch always and everywhere is because we possess specialised cells - or inhibitory spinal interneurons - that prevent every light touch on your skin, like the seam on your shirt, being perceived as something itchy. Why we itch is another question. Of course we know that a mosquito bite will do it, and for obvious evolutionary reasons. But watching someone else scratch themselves can also induce an itchy sensation in your previously unperturbed self.

The one upside to an itch - and I have to say it’s a big upside - is the unadulterated pleasure that comes with scratching it. For that you can thank your deceitful brain, which generates a mild pain sensation every time you draw those fingernails across your skin and releases a shot of serotonin, sometimes called the “feel good” chemical. In effect, your brain is whispering a reassuring “it’s alright now” to your body, regardless of whether your scratching is causing any change to the site of the itch itself.

If you’re wondering, as I did, whether that’s also what happens during an orgasm, it isn’t. That happy event and its accompanying sensations are down to dopamine and oxytocin. How lucky are we to have so many hormones designed to cheer us up?

While I’m being all science-y, let me tell you that serotonin is one weird-ass hormone. Ninety per cent of it is found in your gut, not your brain. It affects not only mood, but also your digestion, appetite, blood clotting, sleep, ability to heal, bone health and libido. Too much serotonin, usually the result of overmedication, can be fatal.

And I mean that literally.

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Bits and specious

Why you suck at proofreading your own work.

You’ve heard of the sunk cost fallacy. Now, for language lovers everywhere, the redoubtable Stan Carey has conjured up the Strunk cost fallacy.

Here’s the recipe for poulet sauté alice.

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Quote of the week

There was a young belle of Natchez
Whose garments were always in patchez.
When comment arose
On the state of her clothes,
She drawled, When Ah itchez, Ah scratchez!

Ogden Nash