Sometimes we get those feelings that are so specific that we think it must be impossible for others to understand them. It's like trying to describe something you've experienced, but you give up after a while because there just aren't the words to explain it in the right way. And what really is language when you think about it, are words ever "real", or are all words "made-up" in some form or another? Authors spend hundreds of thousands of pages trying to convey feelings, settings, and micro-communications between individuals, but what if there was just one word that could explain them all? Taken from the Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, here are some of the most beautiful words to explain the deepest things in life that we could never begin to understand but find ourselves thinking in our day-to-day lives.
1. Chrysalism
n. The amniotic tranquility of being indoors during a thunderstorm, listening to waves of rain pattering against the roof like an argument upstairs, whose muffled words are unintelligible but whose crackling release of built-up tension you understand perfectly.
2. Waldosia
n. A condition characterized by scanning faces in a crowd looking for a specific person who would have no reason to be there, which is your brain's way of checking to see whether they're still in your life, subconsciously patting its emotional pockets before it leaves for the day.
3. Moriturism
n. The insomnia-borne jolt of awareness that you will die, that these passing years aren't just scenes from a dress rehearsal, rounds of an ongoing game or chapters in a story you'll be telling later, but are footprints being lapped by the steadily gathering tide of an unfathomable abyss, which still wouldn't wash out the aftertaste of all those Buffalo wings you devoured just before bedtime.
4. Backmasking
n. The instinctive tendency to see someone as you knew them in their youth, a burned-in image of grass stained knees, graffitied backpacks or handfuls of birthday cake superimposed on an adult with a degree, an illusion formed when someone opens the door to your emotional darkroom while the memory is still developing.
5. Apomakrysmenophobia
n. Fear that your connections with people are ultimately shallow, that although your relationships feel congenial at the time, an audit of your life would produce an emotional safety deposit box of low-interest holdings and uninvested windfall profits, which will indicate you were never really at risk of joy, sacrifice or loss.
6. Flashover
n. The moment a conversation becomes real and alive, which occurs when a spark of trust shorts out the delicate circuits you keep insulated under layers of irony, momentarily grounding the static emotional charge you've built up through decades of friction with the world.
7. Antematter
n. The dream versions of things in your life, which appear totally foreign but are still somehow yours — your anteschool, your antefriends, your antehome - all part of a parallel world whose gravitational pull raises your life's emotional stakes, increasing the chances you'll end up betting everything you have.
8. Ambedo
n. A kind of melancholic trance in which you become completely absorbed in vivid sensory details - raindrops skittering down a window, tall trees leaning in the winds, clouds of cream swirling in your coffee - which leads to a dawning awareness of the haunting fragility of life, a mood whose only known cure is the vuvuzela.
9. Degrassé
adj. Entranced and unsettled by the vastness of the universe, experienced in a jolt of recognition that the night sky is not just a wallpaper but a deeply foreign ocean whose currents are steadily carrying off other castaways, who share our predicament but are already well out of earshot - worlds and stars who would've been lost entirely except for the scrap of light they were able to fling out into the dark, a message in a bottle that's only just now washing up in Earth's atmosphere, an invitation to a party that already ended a million years ago.
10. Onism
n. The frustration of being stuck in just one body, that inhabits only one place at a time, which is like standing in front of the departures screen at an airport, flickering over with strange place names like other people's passwords, each representing one more thing you'll never get to see before you die - and all because, as the arrow on the map helpfully points out, you are here.
If you're what I call a "wordie" (see the definition of "foodie") I highly suggest you see John Koenig's Ted Talks "Beautiful new words to describe obscure emotions". He mediates on the meaning we assign words and is the creator of the aforementioned Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows. Whether or not words are real or made-up, they give us a sense of collectiveness, they make us feel as if we're not so alone in the things that we experience in life. Words have a way of carrying their own weight, they just need someone to assign them meaning.
