Recently, my daughters and I were walking by some people playing pickleball. If you’re not familiar, the game involves a plastic ball being thwacked crisply back and forth, the sound being somewhere between the pop of Ping-Pong and the whop of a smacked Wiffle ball.
“That sound is satisfying,” my 10-year-old warmly observed.
Anyone much older than her probably wouldn’t use the word that way, even if they found that sound similarly satisfying. I’d say “I like that sound” or “There’s something about that sound.” But I wouldn’t apply “satisfying” to it. To me, pickleball looks intriguing and I keep saying I’m going to take it up, but when I walk by people playing it, “satisfaction” doesn’t occur to me.
After informally surveying other parents, I now know that the word “satisfying” has caught on with the tween set. The inception seems to have been a proliferation, starting several years ago, of online videos exploring A.S.M.R. — autonomous sensory meridian response — as a kind of low-grade euphoria one can achieve from various, often mundane experiences such as hearing book pages turned, having one’s hair combed, or listening to repetitive sounds such as finger tapping or whispering. (For an in-depth discussion of the trend, you can check out this 2019 story Jamie Lauren Keiles wrote for The New York Times Magazine.) Since the pandemic, you may or may not have noticed your children watching these videos, full of declarations about that which is “satisfying.”
But there’s more going on here than just kids using a word a little differently than their parents would. The joy of linguistics is in finding structure amid what seems like randomness, and the new sense of “satisfying” is a beautiful example. To understand why, we need to get away from pickleball for a bit.
Languages divide what the world is and feels like in different ways that often appear desultory. A language may approach some sensations, like seeing color, more broadly than English does. For example, in a number of languages, there’s one word that refers to both red and yellow, covering those two plus the stretch of orange in between. In the creole language Saramaccan of Suriname that I have studied, the word for egg yolk translates as the egg’s “red.” Today, Saramaccan has specific words for orange and yellow as well, but the egg “red” expression is a legacy of when the language emerged in the 17th century.
Or, a language may describe some sensations more finely than English does. Some languages have more words for smells than English speakers would be likely to imagine. In English, if we don’t like an odor, we can say something “stinks,” “reeks” or just “smells.” If we like how something smells, we might call it “fragrant” or “aromatic” but those are a little formal; ordinarily, we just say that it “smells good.” If the smell of baked bread is wafting through the air, you don’t say, “Ah, that really aromafies.” You say, “Ah, that smells good.” And to get any more specific, we use comparisons: It smells like butterscotch candy, or teen spirit.
But in Jahai, a language of the Malay Peninsula, there’s an array of single words for smells. They aren’t the words for the things something smells like, but just words, like our “stink.” To smell good, like flowers, perfume or fruit is to “ltpɨt.” To smell like good food — the smell of a Thanksgiving turkey from the kitchen, for instance — is to “cŋəs.” To smell specifically like roasting is to “crŋir.” To stink, like rotten meat or shrimp paste, is to “haʔɛ̃t.”
So back to “satisfying.” My girls bring me the “slime” they have just made from glue, borax and water, and coo about how “satisfying” it is to touch it. They use the same word when describing “fidget” toys. My partner’s son called conquering characters in one of his video games “satisfying” in how it sounds and feels to exert a victory on the screen. My younger one called the feel of the middle of a baguette slice “satisfying” to squeeze.
But the key is what kids are not saying.
Admittedly, my sample so far is limited, but from my quietly obsessive listening to this usage over the past few months, combined with taking a look at these A.S.M.R. videos, I sense that kids wouldn’t call a pretty sunset “satisfying,” even if they admired it. Nor do I hear them saying that the smell of bacon is “satisfying,” even though to many of us olds, it certainly always has been. If my girls like something I cooked for them, they don’t exclaim that it is “satisfying.”
Rather, the kids seem to be using the word this way to refer not to all kinds of sensory experience, but to a subset of them, more often involving sound and touch than sight, smell or taste. And this is not random. The senses of sound and touch both convert physical signals, such as sound waves, into electrical signals. A.S.M.R. videos seem to generate a sensation that strikes me as “auditory-tactile synesthesia,” which Psychology Today describes as occurring “when a sound prompts a specific bodily sensation (such as tingling on the back of one’s neck).” Even when these videos celebrate eating foods, the focus is on how eating them feels physically, rather than specifically their tastes.
Quite unconsciously, American kids are transforming the word “satisfying” into a way of being more Jahai-like, more specific, about sensation. Their “Definition 2” usage is giving overt expression to what the pleasures of hearing the gurgling of a bathtub draining and the feeling of popping Bubble Wrap have in common. You may have to work to wrap your head around the likeness between those two sensations, but it makes sense that a language, in this case, English, would develop a way of corralling auditory and tactile satisfaction off from the visual, olfactory and gustatory.
This isn’t slang. It isn’t about counterculture. I doubt any of the kids using the word this way have any idea they’re even doing anything novel, or refining their language forward. This is the kind of thing that sticks. In 50 years, probably, there will be graying folks at AARP meetings calling pleasant sounds and feels “satisfying.” Dictionaries will eventually distinguish this new usage. We must enjoy seeing language changing in the wild, as it were. This is it, folks — how we go from Shakespeare to right now and beyond.
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John McWhorter (@JohnHMcWhorter) is an associate professor of linguistics at Columbia University. He hosts the podcast “Lexicon Valley” and is the author, most recently, of “Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America.”
