Neil Cake’s Reviews > A Natural History of the Senses > Status Update

I love it when Americans tell us what we do. According to Diane Ackerman, the British still sometimes use the Saxon word, "swyve" for fucking.

I think someone was having her on.

In an entirely imagined picnic with an alien:

"The English cousin asks for a small platter of potted ox tongues..."

I guarantee you, there's no fucking way that's what an English person request above everything else. You mad fucking fantasist.

I could have missed something, but it seems our American friend is too embarrassed to request anything, and presumably finds everything tasteless for lack of bbq sauce.

'Virginia Woolf reminds us in her essay "On Being Ill": "English, which can express the thoughts of Hamlet... has no words for the shiver and the headache..."

That's just not true is it?

Honestly, this is word salad. So much of it is just her making stuff up.

"Why we love to bask isn't hard to fathom. Evolution, that haute couturier of ingenious patterns, probably designed the sensation so that animals would search for climates conducive to good health."

I don't think you're a scientist.

"Science fiction stories often involve an astronaut whose body temperature has been lowered, sleeping in suspended animation like a..."

Wait for it...

"naked bear in a glass den."

This reads like a list of non sequiturs.

"If we ever get a say-so in evolution, one of the things I'd vote for is whiskerlike feelers to keep us from bumping into furniture, friends, or raccoons in the dark."

Yes, raccoons.

Fuckin nutjob.

"When we touch something on purpose - our lover, the fender of a new car, the tongue of a penguin..."