“Phrases are occasions, they do issues, change issues. They rework 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 actual human dialog. Every phrase is a conveyable cathedral by which 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 potential 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 not maintain — the complexity of expertise, the polyphony of voices inside us narrating that have, the eager for readability amid the confusion. There’s, subsequently, singular disorientation to these moments after they fail us — when these prefabricated containers of language end up too small to include feelings without delay 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 truth we expertise.”
The title, although stunning, is deceptive — the emotional states Koenig defines should not obscure however, regardless of their specificity, profoundly relatable and common; they aren’t sorrows however emissaries of the bittersweet, with all its capability for affirming the enjoyment of being alive: maru mori (“the heartbreaking simplicity of abnormal issues”), apolytus (“the second you understand you might be altering as an individual, lastly outgrowing your outdated issues like a reptile shedding its pores and skin”), the wends (“the frustration that you simply’re not having fun with an expertise as a lot as you must… as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 realizing ‘the true you’”), dès vu (“the attention that this second will change into a reminiscence”).
Koenig composites his imaginative etymologies from a mess of sources: names and locations from folklore and popular culture, phrases from chemistry and astronomy, the prevailing lexicon of languages residing and useless, from Latin and Historic Greek to Japanese and Māori. He writes:
In language, all issues are potential. Which signifies that no emotion is untranslatable. No sorrow is simply too obscure to outline. We simply should do it.
[…]
Regardless of what dictionaries would have us imagine, this world continues 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, by which all of the threads of the plot are drawn collectively and all the pieces is defined. Pronounced “ey-noo-mahn.”
QUERINOUS
adj. eager for a way of certainty in a relationship; wishing there have been some solution 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 a substitute 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 realizing how you actually really feel about one thing, which forces you to sift by clues hidden in your personal habits, as when 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 off the bed.Historic Greek ἄγνωστος (ágnōstos), not realizing + 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, not protected contained in the terrarium of hopes and delusions that you simply began up in kindergarten and saved sealed so long as you can.German Ziel, objective + 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 fact — that we’re youngsters of likelihood, born of a billion brilliant improbabilities that prevailed over the infinitely higher odds of nonexistence, residing with solely marginal and principally illusory management over the circumstances of our lives and different individuals’s selections, endlessly 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 issues really feel laughably quaint, but vanishingly uncommon.From galaxy, a gravitationally certain system of hundreds of thousands of stars + agog, awestruck. Pronounced “gal-uh-gawg.”
CRAXIS
n. the unease of realizing how shortly your circumstances may change on you—that regardless of how rigorously you form your life into what you need it to be, the entire thing might be overturned instantly, with little greater than a single phrase, a single step, a telephone name out of the blue, and by the tip of subsequent week you may already be wanting again on this morning as if it had been one million years in the past, a poignant final hurrah of regular life.Latin crāstinō diē, tomorrow + praxis, the method of turning idea into actuality. Pronounced “krak-sis.”
SUERZA
n. a sense of quiet amazement that you simply exist in any respect; a way of gratitude that you simply had been even born within the first place, that you simply by some means emerged alive and respiration 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 personal weight, which you’ve been carrying your whole life with out a second thought.Lakota mahpiohanzi, “a shadow attributable to a cloud.” Pronounced “mah-pee-oh-han-zee-uh.”
Rising from the varied 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 issues; that our time is brief and treasured; that every one of our confusions are a single query, the very best reply to which is love.
Couple The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows with Consolations — poet and thinker David Whyte’s pretty meditations on the deeper meanings of on a regular basis phrases — then revisit artist Ella Frances Sanders’s illustrated dictionary of untranslatable phrases from all over the world and poet Mary Ruefle’s chromatic taxonomy of sadnesses.
