English Dictionary

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. […] 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.