I heard an interview once with a movie maker who'd written a novel. He said the difference between a novel and a movie was description. Consider a scene in which a man comes out of a house, crosses a street, and gets into a car. In the movie, the man comes out of a specific house (town house? detached? in good repair? run down? brown? white?), crosses a specific street (narrow? dark? open to the sky? residential? with shops? with shops with bars on the window?) and gets into a car (Ford? Ferrari? beat-up Yugo?) — each detail is specific and completely controlled by the director. In a novel, the house, no matter how specifically described, is created in the mind of the reader, the same for the street and the car. There are as many specific houses, streets, and cars as there are readers of the novel. And no matter how prolix, the novelist can't describe a scene as specifically as the director can (each glint, dent, and patch of rust on the Yugo).
So words used to describe physical sensations or movements must fall short in a teaching situation. What is
get forward? What does that mean? Once a student has
felt what it means, the term becomes clear —
felt meaning the feel of foot and leg in the boot, the position of the body in relation to gravity, the pressure that is felt in turns and where it is felt, the relationship of the shoulders to the boots, to the hips, to the legs. (And all
that language is more or less useless as well.
)
I know that no
language did what the
sensation of forwardness did. After I felt the sensation, I could say "get forward" with a lot of authority (and not much effectiveness).