ABSTRACT
An exhaustive survey of psychological language (PL) would be tedious to write, and the outcome probably unreadable. A more realistic tactic is therefore adopted in this chapter: an examination in some depth of three of the many different sources of PL. The intimacy of human's psychological involvement with animals is difficult to overestimate; they are, as Levi-Strauss allegedly said, ‘good to think’. While the basic behavioural vocabulary and familiar natural phenomena provided a relatively stable core to PL, it is continually being augmented by new terms derived from areas of novel communal experience, among which the technological and scientific have been particularly powerful in recent centuries. Fire-control terms have proved especially useful for the encoding of what human now term arousal states, and constitute an extension of the temperature-based PL. The psychological importance of fire is extraordinarily far-reaching; it has become a symbol of both life and destruction.
