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“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 Ok. Le Guin wrote in her beautiful manifesto for the magic of actual human dialog. Every phrase is a transportable cathedral wherein we make clear and sanctify our expertise, a reliquary and a laboratory, holding the historical past of our seek for which means and the pliability 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 net of invisible connections undergirding our emotional lives — the way in which “unhappiness” shares a Latin root with “sated” and initially meant a fulness of expertise, the way in which “holy” shares a Latin root with “complete” 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 may be, due to this fact, 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 gives 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 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 peculiar issues”), apolytus (“the second you understand you might be altering as an individual, lastly outgrowing your previous 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 need to… as in case your coronary heart had been inadvertently demagnetized by a surge of expectations”), anoscetia (“the nervousness of not realizing ‘the true you’”), dès vu (“the attention that this second will develop into 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 dwelling and lifeless, from Latin and Historic Greek to Japanese and Māori. He writes:
In language, all issues are potential. Which implies that no emotion is untranslatable. No sorrow is simply too obscure to outline. We simply need to do it.
[…]
Regardless of what dictionaries would have us imagine, this world continues to be largely 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 fabric + dénouement, the ultimate a part of a narrative, wherein all of the threads of the plot are drawn collectively and the whole lot is defined. Pronounced “ey-noo-mahn.”
QUERINOUS
adj. eager for a way of certainty in a relationship; wishing there have been some method 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 realizing how you actually really feel about one thing, which forces you to sift by clues hidden in your personal conduct, as should you have 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 tough to get away from 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 talents 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 may.German Ziel, purpose + 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 vibrant improbabilities that prevailed over the infinitely better odds of nonexistence, dwelling with solely marginal and largely illusory management over the circumstances of our lives and different individuals’s selections, ceaselessly susceptible 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 hundreds of thousands of stars + agog, awestruck. Pronounced “gal-uh-gawg.”
CRAXIS
n. the unease of realizing how rapidly your circumstances might change on you—that irrespective of how fastidiously you form your life into what you need it to be, the entire thing might be overturned straight away, with little greater than a single phrase, a single step, a telephone name out of the blue, and by the top of subsequent week you may already be wanting again on this morning as if it have been one million years in the past, a poignant final hurrah of regular life.Latin crāstinō diē, tomorrow + praxis, the method of turning principle 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 have been even born within the first place, that you simply one way or the other emerged alive and respiratory regardless of all odds, having received an unbroken streak of reproductive lotteries that stretches all the way in which 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 complete life with no second thought.Lakota mahpiohanzi, “a shadow brought on by 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 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 phrases from around the globe and poet Mary Ruefle’s chromatic taxonomy of sadnesses.
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