Their longitudinal study looked at the emotional self-reports of more than 37,000 people. Their report argued that “emodiversity”-having a “variety and relative abundance of the emotions”-may be a long-term predictor of emotional and physical health. In a report published in 2014 in the journal of the American Psychological Association, Jordi Quoidbach and five co-authors discussed the positive affects of expanding our emotional vocabulary, and in turn, our repertoire of feelings. It wasn’t until I learnt the Japanese word Amae, which roughly translates as “the pleasure of surrendering to another in perfect safety,” that I started to experience this feeling in my own life on a regular basis-and discovered how nervous it made me feel. Discover the definition of a new emotion, and you’ll almost certainly find yourself re-organizing your inner world, seeing vague or amorphous sensations as concrete instances of a recognizable category of experience. It’s a long-held belief among therapists that learning to name our emotions can ultimately make them less volatile and uncomfortable.īut less spoken about is the other side of this coin: that learning new words for emotions can also bring feelings to life.

Along with exasperating everyone I know with endless questions, one of the effects of this process is that I’ve come to appreciate some of the more peculiar connections between the words we use to talk about feelings, and the emotions we actually feel. Over the last few years I’ve hunted down words for emotions I didn’t even know I had. Maybe you even have a touch of basorexia-a sudden desire to kiss someone. Or worry about your ambiguphobia (a horror of being misunderstood that leads to excessive clarification and re-clarification). Maybe you are familiar with Hygge (the Danish word for feeling snug and cosy inside with friends when it’s cold outside). Perhaps you’ve experienced the feeling the French sociologist Roger Caillois called “ilinx”-an elated disorientation caused by random acts of destruction, such as kicking over the office recycling bin. And there are others, too, which are so peculiar we don’t even have a name for them. But many disappear before we’ve had a chance to spot them, like the nostalgic twinge that makes you choose a familiar brand in the supermarket. Some emotions, it’s true, really do wash the world in a single color, like the terror felt as the car skids. Could you say, precisely, what you’re feeling right now? Is your stomach tight and knotted at the thought of the surprise you’re planning tonight? Is there an echo of sadness about that letter you received this morning? Are you feeling smug or resentful, gleeful or suspicious-or all of these at once? Trying to name and categorize our emotions can feel just as impossible. Any topology of the clouds, he was forced to admit, would always be “an arrangement more of convenience than true description.” In his diary, he wrote proudly that he “bottled skies” as carefully as his father had bottled sherries, and set about arranging his observations according to new meteorological categories. He noted how some processed lazily and others seemed purposeful. He sketched their purple wisps and scarlet streaks. This is a word that we don’t have in English, so I’m going to break it down for you now.The Victorian critic John Ruskin contemplated the clouds every morning. This word does not exist in the German language!Ī very similar word that does exist in German, however, is Weltschmerz. Weariness with the same old issues that you’ve always had-the same boring flaws and anxieties you’ve been gnawing on for years, which leaves them soggy and tasteless and inert, with nothing interesting left to think about, nothing left to do but spit them out and wander off to the backyard, ready to dig up some fresher pain you might have buried long ago.”Īltschmerz is a compound noun made from the words alt (old) and Schmerz (pain). One of the ones I came across on there had a German name: Altschmerz.

This ‘dictionary’ fills gaps in the English language for feelings that were never given a name. Today’s untranslatable German words post was inspired by John Koenig’s project, The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows.

Foto von dierkschaefer on under CC BY 2.0

Obscure words for sadness