The Great Transfer - Visceral

"I don't get it," my girlfriend said to me, about eighteen months ago. "I don't get how people can like watching stuff like Saw. I prefer something that's intelligent, interesting, visceral."

(Please note, I am paraphrasing. I'm not that great a boyfriend that I've memorized everything that she has ever said to me.)

"No, you don't," I replied. "You don't like visceral things, that's your point."

"Erm... yes, I do."

"No, visceral means bloody or to do with organs etc."

"No, no, it means something that's thoughtful, emotional, clever."

By this point I was very perplexed. "Visceral comes from the word viscera, which means the guts etc. You remove someone's viscera when you eviscerate them."

"We'll see," she replied, ominously, and we continued with our day.

That night, I turned on my laptop and went to dictionary.com for a definition of visceral. Sure enough, there was this definition;

vis·cer·al
Pronunciation[vis-er-uhl]
-adjective
1. of or pertaining to the viscera.
2. affecting the viscera.
3. of the nature of or resembling viscera.
4. characterized by or proceeding from instinct rather than intellect: a visceral reaction.
5. characterized by or dealing with coarse or base emotions; earthy; crude: a visceral literary style.

"See," I said and pointed my laptop at her, sadly glad to be right for once. It's hard to be with someone who's more intelligent than you are when you consider yourself to be intelligent, and sometimes it regrettably brings out lesser qualities in me.

"Hmmm. Go down," she said, and I dutifully scrolled down. There we found an entry from the Online Etymology Dictionary which stated the following;

visceral
1575, "affecting inward feelings," from M.Fr. viscéral, from M.L. visceralis "internal," from L. viscera, pl. of viscus "internal organ," of unknown origin. The bowels were regarded as the seat of emotion. The figurative sense vanished after 1640 and the literal sense is first recorded in 1794. The figurative sense was revived 1940s in arts criticism.

"Ha!" she declared. "We're both right!"

Now, despite my definition having been the main, proper usage of the word, it is apparently now deemed as a ridiculous way to use it! Ever since this little altercation, I've spotted the word in countless reviews, books and websites being used in what I think of as 'My Girlfriend's Way'. Whenever I use it, I almost feel embarrassed to do so, as though I'm the only person in the world who understands that 'sorry' should be a swear word.

I must have picked up the word visceral from a fellow, literal purist or I must have extrapolated its meaning from the word eviscerate (eviscerate -> viscera -> visceral) but, despite my entirely sensible logic, I'm in the minority.

It's not visceral wonder that the English language is so hard to learn!