The Black Mare

I just followed the links on malnpudl's post to the rant from the current VP of the Science Fiction Writers of America about those who give professional level work away for free on the internet. You can read the rant here. The comments, too, are excellent and worthy. He used -- incorrectly -- the word "scabs" to describe those who distribute their work for less or for free when others have fought to be fairly paid. Apparently his cabin in the woods has no dictionary and he, for all his years in college, did not take American history to learn what that word means and what it does not mean. The rant is worth reading as an item of anthropology. The comments are worth reading, too. Plus, you seldom get to see such a public display of cowardice: he refuses all internet interactions, and had a friend post the rant on his behalf, and is refusing to engage anyone not in SFWA [i.e. who has access to the membership directory and his addresses] in furthering this conversation. The only thing I can say that is positive is that at least he knows he shouldn't run for president of the organization. He seems to think there is sufficient support for him that he had to write this to dissuade a grass-roots write-in voting campaign. Surely the members or SFWA are savvy enough to know he's not their best choice.

I would also point out how happy the sex workers in places where sex work is legal and unionized [e.g. Las Vegas and the Netherlands] will be to read this. Taken to a logical conclusion in another field, he is saying that no one should engage in sexual activities with the partner of their choice for free when there are folks out there who have organized and set standards for the proper fees for such work. Clearly love has nothing at all to do with work or our motivations for doing it, even when it requires sacrifice in other areas of our lives.

I have more to say on this topic, but it is sufficiently divergent that I will put it in a separate entry.

Okay, all you literate flist persons. I am looking for a word. I'm not certain that English has one, either native or commandeered. I suspect that other languages do, however. French is a good bet for cultural reasons. This, dear librarians, is just the sort of thing for which I value your skills, as it is not a search that can be done in a dictionary or thesaurus. It takes wetware and intuition, and probably a grasp of metaphor as applied in translation.

Yesterday while chatting with Ms. Pedia, it struck me yet again that there is no adjective for activities involving one of the senses. I have encountered this gap before, and this time I am asking for assistance. To whit:

Sight -- visual, etc.
Sound -- audible, etc.
Touch -- tactile, etc.
Taste -- gustatory
Smell -- ................. <-- gap

I am looking for an adjective that applies to the actions of that sense. Not to the item or event being sensed, but to the act or fact of the sense itself. A sample instance of application:

Antennapedia discovered in her laptop bag three bottles of BPAL and an Altoid tin of Imps. I wanted a way to modify the noun "cacophony" such that it applied to the riotous interaction of so many scents in the nose.

Jackson Pollack paintings are a visual cacophony to me; an orchestra tuning up is an audio cacophony, and so on. Perhaps I am being dense, but I wanted that adjective and couldn't find one. I could, however, immediately remember instances where I needed it in the past and had to generate some kind of work-around solution that was imprecise and therefore less pleasing. As a species, we are not [gap: fill with word to apply to scent] oriented. Dogs probably have twenty-seven words for this. The French, with their profound devotion to wine, perfume, and the intricate manipulation of foodstuffs for pleasure, almost certainly have a word for this. The ancient Greeks had a word for nearly everything, so they probably did for this, too.

I was ambling around LJ yesterday and saw a wonderful icon on one of your flists. It said, "English: the language that beats up other languages and rifles through their pockets in search of spare vocabulary." [Forgive me if I mis-quoted that, but I did love it.] This is one of those times when we need to fan out into the shadowed alleys and pounce on languages likely to have the thing I seek. Please extract it and bring it back to me so I may incorporate it into my active vocabulary and use it so rigorously that it eventually forgets it came from somewhere else.

In return, if I can be of any assistance to any of you in the vivid expression of a linguistically intractable phenomenon, please do not hesitate to ask.