feel

A verb for emotions may have started life as a kind of soft strike. The old Germanic ancestor of feel, *foljanan, seems to sit under the same distant PIE root *pel- that helped build words for striking, driving, and even felt, the matted stuff in a wool cap or on a cheap winter boot. That is a delicious little trick of language: a physical contact word slides from fingertips to feelings, so by the Middle Ages English speakers could say they felt pain, then sympathy, then an opinion. Its cousin think is especially sneaky here, because English keeps collapsing sensation and judgment into the same mental drawer. By 1829, feel like was already doing what modern speech still does in text messages and group chats: turning the body into a compass for desire. So feel is what happens when touch stops being just touch and becomes the place where mind and mood first announce themselves.