The English language has an estimated one million words, though many are gifts from other languages. The Eton Institute suggests that the average English speaker has a vocabulary somewhere between 20,000 and 35,000 words — and despite that, we still struggle to put feelings into words.
Certain emotions transcend definition. Even those we do have definitions for lose something in translation. Webster defines love as “strong affection for another arising out of kinship or personal ties,” but that doesn’t account for the level of devotion that humans have felt for millions of years. It doesn’t account for Shakespeare, for Yeats, for Fitzgerald. The poets of yesteryear strove each day to capture something ephemeral with parchment and ink, whispering words different, yet somehow the same, of a spell spoken a billion times over a million years.
I lead with this to introduce The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows by John Koenig. Part dictionary, part philosophical treatise, the book is on a mission “to shine a light on the fundamental strangeness of being a human being.” It seeks to define emotions that English does not yet have the words for.
There are a slew of words that touch the human heart, but for which English has no equivalent. Consider the Welsh hiraeth, for instance — a sense of longing for a home you never knew. Another word that has become trendy in recent years is hygge, a Danish phrase that describes a feeling of contentment and coziness.
We can borrow these words to try and express ourselves, but Koenig’s book takes it a step farther.
The words in the Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows aren’t official terms, though perhaps they will be in another few hundred years. Most are made-up terms, combinations of morphemes and phonemes and words sampled from other languages, blended in a way that pays homage to the original.
The book is only 272 pages long, but it read like an epic poem. A love letter to language, with just a dash of, “Oh, so I’m not the only one who feels that way.”
Take astrophe, one of the first words in the dictionary. Koenig defines it as “the feeling of being stuck on Earth,” but the beauty lies in the universality of the feeling. Have you ever stared at the night sky, dreaming of distant planets, worlds forever out of reach? I often feel that way. To purloin another phase, “Born too late to explore the Earth, but too soon to explore the stars.”
Or perhaps onism resonates more. “The awareness of how little of the world you’ll experience.” I’m 35 years old now. That’s still young by most accounts, but it’s difficult to not think back a decade ago to the man astride a bicycle, pedaling his way up Japan’s length, chasing the blooming cherry blossoms. A mind full of plans, yet time seems to have flown by since then. How much faster will it seem, then, in another ten years?
Given the current political climate, liberosis feels fitting — a desire to care less about things. To take repose in the mundane and not worry about the cares of daily life, the state of the world, or even the weather.
Anoscetia poses the question: do you know the real you? Do you actually like what you like? Are your interests actually your interests, or is it all somehow imposed upon you? Often, other people define who we are. We are shy, gloomy, outspoken, opinionated. One person might be a gamer. Another might be a jock. That’s the way the world sees them, but is that how they see themselves? And you — is the way you depict yourself to the world actually the truth of who you are? “But the more you look into who you are in isolation, the more your identity dissolves into the noise of random impulses, dust on a blank canvas.”
Be warned: The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows can prompt inward examination that threatens to spiral into an existential crisis. Despite that, or perhaps because of that, it’s a book everyone should read.
Not every word holds the same emotional resonance. Koenig misses the mark in some cases, choosing words that feel juvenile or amateur, out of place with the rest. Consider scabulous, a combination of the words scab and fabulous. The word doesn’t draw in the eye, nor does it hold any phonesthetic value. It sounds like schoolyard slang, and not in a good way.
Despite a few whiffs here and there, The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows is a book that will take the reader on an introspective journey. It’s impossible to read the efforts to define these emotions without looking inwards, remembering times when you felt the same sensations.
What’s more, you might find yourself reading about emotions you’ve never experienced and realize that every human heart is different. There are emotions that everyone feels, while others will only be known, for better or worse, by a few throughout their lives.
But one thing is certain: this book shines a light onto some of the dustiest corners of the soul, revealing both the beauty and the terror of the human experience. And that journey promises to make us all just a little bit more empathetic.