ABSTRACT
This first chapter explores a fundamental and incredibly difficult aspect of sensory training: the learning of new vocabularies and how to find words for the sensate. For centuries, humans have struggled to find ways to articulate sensory experience. This chapter explores this issue first through the example of coffee cupping. Amidst flavour charts and beans, I learn new words for ‘coffee’. The difficulties of articulation of smell are further examined through the cases of perfumers and amateur/expert wine tasters, who attach words to smells and tastes, with the help of odour kits, for example. The final case takes the reader into medical schools where novice doctors are undergoing the same linguistic sensory training, learning to describe lung sounds, breath smells, microbiology slides and other pathologies. Through these cases, the chapter explores particular ways in which the subjective experience of sensing is ‘put into words’, and the various strategies involved in the attempt to share experience.
