I saw her today, I saw her face. It was the face I loved.

[venta]

Earlier today I was reading on Wikipedia about "paresthesia". Have you ever suffered paresthesia? I imagine you have, it's the proper name for pins-and-needles.

I'm pretty sure that any UK English speaker would understand "pins and needles", and that relatively few would understand paresthesia. I don't know about the rest of the English-speaking world (do you?) If I'd been reporting pins and needles as a symptom, it wouldn't even have occurred to me that that there might be a proper term for it.

Switching Wikipedia to German told me that they call it "Ameisenlaufen", so in Germany you don't suffer from the pricking of pins, but from ants running on you.

French Wikipedia wasn't playing, but Google translate helpfully rendered "pins and needles" as "Avoir des fourmis" which I think also indicates they have the ants.

(Google translate unhelpfully turns pins and needles into "Pins und Nadeln" in German, which is inconsistently literal.)

Does anyone out there have any news from other languages? And whether the slang term is used almost universally in preference to the medical term? Or indeed any English alternatives?

It's never before struck me that it's quite odd that we use the metaphor almost exclusively, and to the exclusion of its literal meaning.

Comments

[bopeepsheep.livejournal.com]

Italians also have ants. (Formica is ant, which confused the heck out of me when I was a child*; formicolio is pins and needles.)

Oh, one of the English terms is formication, which refers to a very specific type of paraesthesia - the "something crawling on/under my skin" type. The more common "my dead foot is now waking up" tingling is much less unpleasant, thankfully.




* When I was v small - the summers of 1975 and 1976 - there were major infestations of ants, among other things. My dad's English was not then up to "there is another swarm of flying ants" so he would come indoors muttering darkly about what I thought was the stuff on the kitchen counters.

[venta.livejournal.com]

Well, it was the 70s... Unexpected hideousnesses relating to laminate worktops were an occupational hazard...

[bopeepsheep.livejournal.com]

Very true. Although to be fair, the inside of our cupboards were much more hideous than the countertops. Sticky-back plastic has a lot to answer for. :D

[venta.livejournal.com]

Yes, I've lived in a few rental houses where someone had clearly thought sticky-backed plastic was a good idea (apparently some millennia earlier...)

[shermarama]

But this is all tied up, because formica is made using melamine resin, and one of the ingredients of that is formaldehyde, which is the aldehyde of formic acid, which is called that because it was first isolated from the bodies of ants... In other words, it was named at least partly after ants.

[venta.livejournal.com]

Well, now I've learned something interesting and feel like today hasn't been wasted. Thank you!

[bopeepsheep.livejournal.com]

Oh, I know that now, but 3yo me was very confused as to why dad was cursing at the worktops. :D