the.com/sensibility
Taste with feelings attached — knowing why something moves you, not just that it does.
means A refined capacity to feel and respond appropriately to emotional, aesthetic, or moral stimuli — sensitivity trained into discernment.
from From Latin sensibilis, 'capable of being perceived by the senses,' built on sentire, 'to feel.' It entered English through French in the 1600s meaning simply the capacity to receive sensation, but by the 1700s it had swelled into something grander: a cultivated tenderness of heart, the mark of a person who felt things delicately and visibly. That's the 'sensibility' Jane Austen pits against 'sense' — not mere feeling, but feeling refined into a kind of social performance and virtue, for better and worse.
- austen's split
- sense is reason, sensibility is feeling, both can misfire
- 18th century cult
- once meant extreme emotional responsiveness, practically a fainting sport
- not same as sensitive
- sensitive reacts, sensibility interprets and judges the reaction
- plural usage
- sensibilities are the specific things that offend or delight you