“Words are events, they do things, they change things. They transform both the speaker and the hearer; they feed energy back and forth and amplify. They feed understanding or emotion back and forth and amplify,” Ursula K. Le Guin wrote in her excellent manifesto on the magic of real human conversation. Each word is a portable cathedral where we clarify and sanctify our knowledge, a foundation and a laboratory, which holds the history of our search for meaning and the extent of the possible future, of the presence of richer and deeper experiences than those we express in our external visions. In the roots of words we find the portal of the mycelial web of invisible connections that emphasize our emotional lives – the way “sorrow” shares the Latin root “satiety” and originally meant the fullness of experience, the way “holy” shares the Latin root “all” and has its Indo-European origin in the idea of the unity of all things.
Because we know their power, we ask for words to grasp what we cannot grasp – the complexity of experience, the polyphony of voices within us that narrate what is happening, the longing for clarity in the midst of confusion. Therefore, there is one confusion in those moments when they do not fail – when these pre-constructed language containers become too small to contain feelings at the same time overextended and clearly defined.
John Koenig offers a solution to this deficiency Dictionary of Ambiguous Grief (public library) — a touching invitation to “set to work redefining the world around us, until our language is more like the reality we face.”
The title, while beautiful, is misleading – the emotional states Koenig describes are not hidden but, despite their specifics, deeply relatable and universal; they are not sorrow, but they are messengers of bitter pleasure, with all their power to ensure the joy of life; maru mori (“the sad simplicity of ordinary things”), apolitus (“when you realize that you are changing as a person, you finally get over your old problems like a reptile sheds its skin”) the wends (“frustration that you are not enjoying what has happened as you should… it is as if your heart has been unconsciously demagnetized by high expectations”), anoscetia (“the anxiety of not knowing the 'real you'”), yes vu (“knowing that this moment will be a memory”).
Koenig compiles his fictional etymologies from many sources: words and places from folk history and pop culture, words from chemistry and astronomy, existing dictionaries of living and dead languages, from Latin and ancient Greek to Japanese and Māori. You write:
With language all things are possible. Which means no emotion is untranslatable. There is no sorrow too hidden to be explained. We just have to do it.
[…]
Despite what the dictionaries would have us believe, this world is still largely undefined.
There are various words that speak to the strange uncertainty of the two basic components of human life: time and love.
ÉNOUEMENT
n. the pain of getting here in the future, finally learning the answers to how things turned out but not being able to tell your past self.French orto remove defective pieces from the fabric member + denouementthe last part of the story, where all the plot threads are drawn together and everything is explained. It's pronounced “ey-noo-mahn.”
QUERINOUS
adj. longing for a sense of certainty in a relationship; I wish there was some way to know in advance if this is the person who will wake up next to him twenty thousand mornings in a row, instead of counting them one by one, quietly hoping and hoping that your route will continue.Mandarin 英语 (quérèn), guarantee. Twenty thousand days is about fifty-five years. It's pronounced “kweh-ruh-nuhs.”
There are words associated with self-awareness challenges.
AGNOSTHESIA
n. the state of not knowing how you really feel about something, which forces you to sift through the clues hidden in your own behavior, as if you were someone else – you see the acid twist in your voice, the obscene amount of effort you put into something small, or the mysterious weight on your shoulders that makes it difficult to get out of bed.Ancient Greek ἄγνωστος (agnostos), ignorant + διάθεσις (diathesis), state, condition. It's pronounced “ag-nos-thee-zhuh.”
ZIELSCHMERZ
n. the fear of finally pursuing a lifelong dream, which requires you to put your true skills out there to be tested on the open savannah, no longer protected within the terrarium of hopes and illusions that started up in kindergarten and kept sealed for as long as possible.German Zielgoal + Schmerzpain. It's called “zeel-shmerts.”
There are words that strengthen us in both the smallness and the greatness of life, its terrible weakness, its destructive beauty; Words tasked with capturing the most difficult truth of all—that we are children of fortune, born of a billion bright contingencies that overcame great odds of none, living with the least and most illusory control over the circumstances of our lives and the choices of other people, forever at risk of the dangers of a universe that does not respond to our hopes.
GALAGOG
n. a state of simultaneous and intractable enormity with the vastness of the universe, which makes your deepest concerns feel strange, but rarely disappear.From the galaxy, the gravitationally bound system of billions of stars + agog, is amazing. It's pronounced “gal-uh-gawg.”
CRAXIS
n. the discomfort of knowing how quickly your circumstances can change for you—that no matter how carefully you shape your life into what you want it to be, the whole thing can be destroyed in an instant, with little more than one word, one step, an unexpected phone call, and at the end of next week you'll be looking back at this morning as if it were a million years ago, the chaos of the last painful life.Latin crastinō diētomorrow + praxisthe process of turning theory into reality. It's pronounced “krak-sis.”
SUERZA
n. a sense of peaceful wonder that it exists at all; a feeling of gratitude that you were born in the first place, that somehow you came out alive and breathing against all odds, having won an unbroken series of fertility lotteries dating back to the beginning of life itself.Spanish suerteluck + fuerzastrength. It's pronounced “soo-wair-zuh.”
MAHPIOHANZIA
n. the frustration of not being able to fly, not being able to stretch your arms and kneel in the air, you have finally released the burden of your weight, which you have carried all your life without thinking twice.Lakota phios“the shadow caused by the cloud.” It's pronounced “mah-pee-oh-han-zee-uh.”
The emergence of various entries is a reminder, both troubling and comforting, that despite how different our experiences feel, we all face the same basic concerns; that our time is short and precious; that all our conflicts are one question, the best answer to which is love.
A couple Dictionary of Ambiguous Grief with Comfort – Poet and philosopher David Whyte beautiful meditations on the deeper meanings of everyday words – then revisit artist Ella Frances Sanders' illustrated dictionary of untranslatable words from around the world and poet Mary Ruefle's chromatic taxonomy of sadness.
