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

[feanelwa.livejournal.com]

I'll ask at work, can probably get you Mandarin, one Indian language, maybe Farsi, depends who I see.

[venta.livejournal.com]

Ooh, thanks. I don't really have any contacts for Asian languages and would be really interested to know what approach they take.

If I were in the office (which I'm not at present) I could round up a decent selection of languages, but mostly European and South American. I'll have to start asking when I go back.

[feanelwa.livejournal.com]

Ok, in Polish they say ants too. In China they just say a phrase which means "numb nerve".

[venta.livejournal.com]

I missed this comment when you posted it! Thanks for asking :)

Numb nerve? That's disappointingly non-metaphorical. Could do better, China! (Based on I have no idea what, I expect Chinese to be a language big on metaphors.)