Comments on: How did people describe "electric" experiences before electricity?

Question: How did people describe "electric" experiences before electricity?

paul_smatatoes — Wed, 20 Dec 2006 08:17:50 -0800

How did people describe "electric" experiences before electricity? I got to wondering when someone described the feeling of being pressed up against someone as "electric"...surely people had that experience (for example) before it meant "like invisible power" or "tingly all over"?

Ok, so the etymology is that it comes from "electrum", meaning "amber", which could be used to generate a static charge that would attract bits of hay, etc. Surely people didn't say, "oh, this powerful, exciting feeling is just like dander sticking to amber!"

By: Faint of Butt

Faint of Butt — Wed, 20 Dec 2006 08:27:11 -0800

"Thrilling," perhaps?

By: Sara Anne

Sara Anne — Wed, 20 Dec 2006 08:32:39 -0800

I can't go grab my copy of his complete works right now (at work) but I believe that if you picked up anything by Poe you'd find what you're looking for.

By: allkindsoftime

allkindsoftime — Wed, 20 Dec 2006 08:38:37 -0800

They didn't have electricity in Bible times, maybe try Song of Solomon.

By: nebulawindphone

nebulawindphone — Wed, 20 Dec 2006 08:44:06 -0800

The Ancient Greek word entheos — we get "enthusiasm" from it — could mean either "posessed" or "inspired." I don't know for sure, but I like to think that the double meaning there illustrates one way that the ancients conceptualized that sort of excitment. It's still a source of energy in that metaphor — just divine energy rather than physical.

By: occhiblu

occhiblu — Wed, 20 Dec 2006 08:46:44 -0800

In French and Italian, the phrase for "love at first sight" is "hit by a thunderbolt" (or lightening? I always get it confused). In any event, still electric in some ways, actually, but with the nice tie-in to Jupiter's divine inspiration.

By: MrMoonPie

MrMoonPie — Wed, 20 Dec 2006 09:12:40 -0800

Poe used electric.

By: jacalata

jacalata — Wed, 20 Dec 2006 09:49:00 -0800

According to the online dictionary of etymology (whatever that's worth) 'electric' has been around since 1600, so you'd have to look around then or earlier for literature. (Poe is 1800s)

By: Methylviolet

Methylviolet — Wed, 20 Dec 2006 09:58:49 -0800

It may not have come out of a wall-outlet, but people knew electricity -- thunderstorms. The way the air feels just before a thunderstorm is a pretty good simulation of being with your special one. Tom Jones by Henry Fielding, usually considered the first novel in English, mentions electricity.

By: twistofrhyme

twistofrhyme — Wed, 20 Dec 2006 10:00:01 -0800

i've heard of feeling galvanized- is that similar? i'm too lazy to check. on second thought, maybe you use electricity to galvanize. hmm. that wasn't a very useful answer. ...i'll just be over here sticking this knife into this toaster.

By: Mister_A

Mister_A — Wed, 20 Dec 2006 10:21:49 -0800

Don't do it Twist! Galvanic is pretty good actually... I just don't know when it came into use.

By: DrSkrud

DrSkrud — Wed, 20 Dec 2006 10:28:46 -0800

According to the OED, "electric" was first used by William Gilbert in his treatise De Magnete.

From the Wikipedia article on De Magnete:

he also studied static electricity produced by amber. Amber is called elektron in Greek, and electrum in Latin, so Gilbert decided to refer to the phenomenon by the adjective electricus and the noun electricitas, giving rise to the modern terms 'electric' and 'electricity'.

And according to the History of Electricity article, De Magnete was the earliest academic entry on the topic... so I guess it doesn't really answer your question at all -- just sets a time frame.

By: MrMoonPie

MrMoonPie — Wed, 20 Dec 2006 11:11:44 -0800

And, of course, amber wasn't the only source of static electricity. Since folks have been weaving wool since at least 1500 BC, I bet they've known of electricity at least that long. That doesn't answer your question of what they called it, but they must have identified the feeling.

By: paduasoy

paduasoy — Wed, 20 Dec 2006 11:35:18 -0800

If you're talking about feelings around romantic love, isn't this a fairly recent concept in many societies? Yes, I know there are bits of classical texts which we can interpret as describing that kind of obsessive erotic attraction, but I don't see that we can get very far talking about words for a feeling that's really hard to define now (I'm not even sure I'm interpeting your definition terribly well) and which has probably changed over time.

But in any case, wouldn't "feeling tingly all over" work even before electricity was a widely-understood notion? Pins and needles, for instance. Butterflies in stomach (don't know when that was first used)?

By: Abiezer

Abiezer — Wed, 20 Dec 2006 13:13:14 -0800

Chicago Public radio broadcast a series on the history of the senses that includes an episode on touch you can listen to online.
One of the participants is Professor Elizabeth Harvey, who edited a collection of essays, Sensible Flesh: On Touch in Early Modern Culture. If I understand your question right, you might the discussion interesting.

By: honest knave

honest knave — Wed, 20 Dec 2006 14:36:36 -0800

Galvanic is also electric.

Keep in mind that this is a metaphor. An "electric" experience isn't some fundamental human experience. It's merely an experience (likely a range of experiences differing for each person) which someone compares to electricity, possibly including ideas of lightning, the fizzle-pop of an arc light, the stimulation of the motor nerves (see Galvani), static electricity, mild AC electrocution, 9-volt batteries to the tongue, the magic brightness of a light bulb, a feeling which rushes quickly through the senses, etc...

In order to work, the metaphor requires some shared experience which the speaker can guess may be understood by the audience. Insofar as people are not able to understand electricity, they are likely not to understand that kind of feeling, especially in the case where the metaphor refers to experiences in which expectations highly color our perception.

Recent discoveries and scientific theories were a big part of literary metaphor for many highly-educated Renaissance writers, which is one reason some of them are so hard to understand. We can't easily relate to hermetics and alchemy, so we don't always get what they're talking about.

Dissimilarity in the material for metaphor can also exist alongside dissimilarities of experience. Writers of other times *didn't* have the exact same experiences as we do, because they lived in different socio-economic contexts. For example: Shakespeare might have had a cup of tea in his lifetime; it was rare and horribly expensive and brand new to Europe toward the end of his life. If he did, it was nothing like tea today.

Note: we often put backdoors to our metaphor, as in the use of "electric" to modify "thrill" instead of "experience".

Note: I hadn't actually ever heard of "electric" used to describe human physical contact. I suspect that such impersonal ideas about the experience of mutual physical contact might have seemed odd to some people in the past.

Donne used the metaphor of alchemy -- something mysterious, but magically powerful, and strongly physical, which involves some kind of mixing, merging, etc... Here are two Renaissance poems which employ a similar idea to electricity: the idea of magnetism, though with a much different meaning:

The Magnet
by Thomas Stanley (1647)

Ask the Empresse of the night
How the hand which guides her sphear,
Constant in unconstant light,
Taught the waves her yoke to bear,
And did thus by loving force
Curb or tame the rude seas course.

Ask the female Palme how shee
First did woo her husbands love;
And the Magnet, ask how he
Doth th'obsequious iron move;
Watters, plants and stones know this,
That they love, not what love is.

Be not then less kind than these,
Or from love exempt alone,
Let us twine like amorous trees,
And like rivers melt in one;
Or if thou more cruell prove
Learne of steel and stones to love.

From The Antiplatonick
by John Cleveland (1653)

The souldier, that man of iron,
Whom ribs of Horror all inviron;
That's strung with Wire, instead of Veins,
In whose embraces you're in chains,
Let a Magnetick girl appear;
Straight he turns Cupid's Cuirasseer,
Love storms his lips, and takes the Fortresse in,
For all the Bristled Turn-pikes of his chin.

By: freebird

freebird — Wed, 20 Dec 2006 14:39:52 -0800

I seem to see "innervating", "invigorating", and "stimulating" a lot in old writing. Being "nervous" seemed to have less negative connotations, and might be used in a similar manner.

By: honest knave

honest knave — Wed, 20 Dec 2006 14:53:09 -0800

"innervate" would have been after 1811.

By: Count Ziggurat

Count Ziggurat — Fri, 22 Dec 2006 16:17:03 -0800

Perhaps "shocking"?

By: TravisJeffery

TravisJeffery — Fri, 22 Dec 2006 18:31:39 -0800

I would think shocking.

By: trinarian

trinarian — Mon, 25 Dec 2006 10:09:53 -0800

shock is too explosive/violent, no tingly

By: yoz420

yoz420 — Tue, 26 Dec 2006 17:34:06 -0800

And is love then more
Than the kick galvanic
Or the thundering roar
of Ash volcanic
Belched from some crater
Or earth-fire within?
Are we automata
or Angel-kin?

-R. H. Ash

Possession - a Romance
by A.S. Byatt

By: PeterMcDermott

PeterMcDermott — Wed, 27 Dec 2006 14:18:49 -0800

Methylviolet: "Tom Jones by Henry Fielding, usually considered the first novel in English, mentions electricity."

Surely it was Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, which predates Tom Jones by about thirty years?

By: selfmedicating

selfmedicating — Wed, 27 Dec 2006 22:14:50 -0800

"frisson"

By: Skeptic

Skeptic — Thu, 28 Dec 2006 03:59:34 -0800

I'd have thought the word "spark" to be pretty obvious in this context. It's also interesting to notice that it is used for three things that are similar in appearance, but quite different in nature: electric sparks, sparks from fire and sparks from grinding...

By: pracowity

pracowity — Tue, 02 Jan 2007 04:15:05 -0800

How did people describe "electric" experiences before electricity?

This entire episode tastes of bearded clam!

(Faded from usage after invention of nine-volt battery.)