Feeling wet

Yesterday in one of my classes, a female student from China said that she didn't like to exercise in the morning because she felt "wet".  At first, I couldn't believe my ears, so I asked her, "Did you say 'wet'?"  "Yes," she said, "wet".  I couldn't understand in what way she would feel "wet" in the morning and how that would prevent her from doing exercises.

We wouldn't use the English word "wet" to describe a morning condition that would discourage us from doing exercises, so I tried to think of other related words (synonyms or near-synonyms for "wet") that would work better.  "Logy"? "sodden"? "heavy"?  But I couldn't come up with any equivalent words that would fit the bill.  I specifically was disinclined to choose the word "shī 濕", which literally does mean "wet", but didn't believe that's what she meant because it would signify something like "drenched", "dripping", "soaked", not a systemic condition of the body, unless it means something in traditional Chinese medicine that I'm not aware of.

I puzzled over this conundrum for a while without making any significant progress, so today I sent her an e-mail asking the following question:  "What Chinese word / concept did you have in mind when you said you felt 'wet' in the morning"?

She promptly replied, "When I say 'wet', it means 'shī 濕'（cháoshī de 潮濕的 ['moist, damp'], shīrùn de 濕潤的 ['wet, humid']) in Chinese, or in English I may say 'moist', 'humid', or 'damp' instead."

I almost fell through the floor.

See the "Selected readings" below.

 

Selected readings

• "Moist aversion: The twitter thread" (4/28/20) — with nearly a score of earlier LLOG posts on word aversion and related phenomena, some bordering on the scandalous

Here are a couple of additional posts that I dug up on my own:

• "Wet turban needless wash" (8/5/08)
• "The mystery of "mouthfeel'" (11/2/16)

If you look at the entries in this google search, you will find that studies on the phenomenon of "moist aversion" worked their way out from Language Log to the broader internet.