“Phrases are occasions, they do issues, change issues. They remodel each speaker and hearer; they feed power forwards and backwards and amplify it. They feed understanding or emotion forwards and backwards and amplify it,” Ursula Okay. Le Guin wrote in her beautiful manifesto for the magic of real human conversation. Every phrase is a conveyable cathedral wherein we make clear and sanctify our expertise, a reliquary and a laboratory, holding the historical past of our seek for that means and the elasticity of the attainable future, of there being richer and deeper dimensions of expertise than these we identify in our floor impressions. Within the roots of phrases we discover a portal to the mycelial internet of invisible connections undergirding our emotional lives — the best way “disappointment” shares a Latin root with “sated” and initially meant a fulness of expertise, the best way “holy” shares a Latin root with “entire” and has its Indo-European origins within the notion of the interleaving of all issues.
As a result of we all know their energy, we ask of phrases to carry what we can’t maintain — the complexity of expertise, the polyphony of voices inside us narrating that have, the eager for readability amid the confusion. There’s, due to this fact, singular disorientation to these moments once they fail us — when these prefabricated containers of language prove too small to include feelings directly overwhelmingly expansive and acutely particular.
John Koenig affords a treatment for this lack in The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows (public library) — a soulful invitation to “get to work redefining the world round us, till our language extra carefully matches the fact we expertise.”
The title, although stunning, is deceptive — the emotional states Koenig defines are usually not obscure however, regardless of their specificity, profoundly relatable and common; they don’t seem to be sorrows however emissaries of the bittersweet, with all its capability for affirming the enjoyment of being alive: maru mori (“the heartbreaking simplicity of bizarre issues”), apolytus (“the second you notice you’re altering as an individual, lastly outgrowing your outdated issues like a reptile shedding its pores and skin”), the wends (“the frustration that you just’re not having fun with an expertise as a lot as you must… as in case your coronary heart had been inadvertently demagnetized by a surge of expectations”), anoscetia (“the anxiousness of not understanding ‘the actual you’”), dès vu (“the notice that this second will turn out to be a reminiscence”).
Koenig composites his imaginative etymologies from a large number of sources: names and locations from folklore and popular culture, phrases from chemistry and astronomy, the prevailing lexicon of languages residing and lifeless, from Latin and Historical Greek to Japanese and Māori. He writes:
In language, all issues are attainable. Which signifies that no emotion is untranslatable. No sorrow is simply too obscure to outline. We simply must do it.
[…]
Regardless of what dictionaries would have us consider, this world remains to be principally undefined.
There are numerous phrases addressing the maddening uncertainty of the 2 elementary dimensions of human life: time and love.
ÉNOUEMENT
n. the bittersweetness of getting arrived right here sooner or later, lastly studying the solutions to how issues turned out however being unable to inform your previous self.French énouer, to pluck faulty bits from a stretch of material + dénouement, the ultimate a part of a narrative, wherein all of the threads of the plot are drawn collectively and every little thing is defined. Pronounced “ey-noo-mahn.”
QUERINOUS
adj. eager for a way of certainty in a relationship; wishing there have been some technique to know forward of time whether or not that is the particular person you’re going to get up subsequent to for twenty thousand mornings in a row, as an alternative of getting to rely them out one after the other, quietly hoping your streak continues.Mandarin 确认 (quèrèn), affirmation. Twenty thousand days is roughly fifty-five years. Pronounced “kweh-ruh-nuhs.”
There are phrases that reckon with the challenges of self-knowledge.
AGNOSTHESIA
n. the state of not understanding how you actually really feel about one thing, which forces you to sift via clues hidden in your individual conduct, as should you had been another particular person — noticing a twist of acid in your voice, an obscene quantity of effort you place into one thing trifling, or an inexplicable weight in your shoulders that makes it troublesome to get away from bed.Historical Greek ἄγνωστος (ágnōstos), not understanding + διάθεσις (diáthesis), situation, temper. Pronounced “ag-nos-thee-zhuh.”
ZIELSCHMERZ
n. the dread of lastly pursuing a lifelong dream, which requires you to place your true skills on the market to be examined on the open savannah, now not protected contained in the terrarium of hopes and delusions that you just began up in kindergarten and stored sealed so long as you could possibly.German Ziel, aim + Schmerz, ache. Pronounced “zeel-shmerts.”
There are phrases that anchor us in each the smallness and the grandeur of existence, its fierce fragility, its devastating magnificence; phrases tasked with holding the toughest reality — that we’re youngsters of likelihood, born of a billion vibrant improbabilities that prevailed over the infinitely greater odds of nonexistence, residing with solely marginal and principally illusory management over the circumstances of our lives and different individuals’s selections, ceaselessly weak to the accidents of a universe insentient to our hopes.
GALAGOG
n. the state of being concurrently entranced and unsettled by the vastness of the cosmos, which makes your deepest considerations really feel laughably quaint, but vanishingly uncommon.From galaxy, a gravitationally sure system of thousands and thousands of stars + agog, awestruck. Pronounced “gal-uh-gawg.”
CRAXIS
n. the unease of understanding how shortly your circumstances might change on you—that regardless of how fastidiously you form your life into what you need it to be, the entire thing might be overturned right away, with little greater than a single phrase, a single step, a cellphone name out of the blue, and by the top of subsequent week you may already be trying again on this morning as if it had been 1,000,000 years in the past, a poignant final hurrah of regular life.Latin crāstinō diē, tomorrow + praxis, the method of turning concept into actuality. Pronounced “krak-sis.”
SUERZA
n. a sense of quiet amazement that you just exist in any respect; a way of gratitude that you just had been even born within the first place, that you just one way or the other emerged alive and respiratory regardless of all odds, having gained an unbroken streak of reproductive lotteries that stretches all the best way again to the start of life itself.Spanish suerte, luck + fuerza, power. Pronounced “soo-wair-zuh.”
MAHPIOHANZIA
n. the frustration of being unable to fly, unable to stretch out your arms and vault into the air, having lastly shrugged off the burden of your individual weight, which you’ve been carrying your total life with no second thought.Lakota mahpiohanzi, “a shadow brought on by a cloud.” Pronounced “mah-pee-oh-han-zee-uh.”
Rising from the assorted entries is a reminder, each haunting and comforting, that regardless of how singular our expertise feels, we’re all grappling with nearly the identical core considerations; that our time is brief and valuable; that every one of our confusions are a single query, the most effective reply to which is love.
Couple The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows with Consolations — poet and thinker David Whyte’s beautiful meditations on the deeper meanings of on a regular basis phrases — then revisit artist Ella Frances Sanders’s illustrated dictionary of untranslatable words from around the world and poet Mary Ruefle’s chromatic taxonomy of sadnesses.
