Oh my word!

This week I’m going to start by being starlorn and end by not feeling evertheless. Confused? I’ll explain.

I want to recommend a book: The Dictionary Of Obscure Sorrows, by John Koenig. It is a collection of emotions that don’t have names.

I think you’d enjoy this book. It bursts with wistful ideas and imagination, and has multiple triggers for further thought. I believe that thinking about words, what they mean and how to use them, is really the process of defining what language is.

The emotions in the book have had names invented for them, usually fashioned from Latin or Greek roots, or tipping their hat to loanwords from other languages. Which is true of many words in English.

I have listed my favourite obscure sorrows:

Starlorn: a feeling of immense loneliness when looking at the night sky. Wildred: the haunting solitude of remote places. Des vu: the awareness that this moment will become a memory you’ll often look back on. Scabulous: pride in a scar because it is a reminder. Elsewise: struck by the strangeness of other people’s homes.

Tichloch: the anxiety of never knowing how much time you have left. Eftless: a feeling of disappointment that you won’t attend your own funeral. Sonder: the realisation that each passer-by is living a life as vivid and complex as your own.

The wends: frustration that you’re not enjoying an event as much as you should. Hiddled: the loneliness of having to keep a secret. Thwit: a pang of shame when an embarrassing memory from adolescence pops back into your head.

Innity: the solitude of being alone in a hotel room late at night. Zenosyne: the feeling that time is getting faster. Keta: an image from your distant past that suddenly leaps back to your mind’s eye.

Lap year: the age at which you become older than your parents were when you were born. The whipgraft delusion: when you glimpse yourself in a mirror and feel you’re looking at a stranger. Looseleft: the sense of loss upon finishing a good book and letting go of the connection you had with the characters in it.

Some of the obscure sorrows I didn’t connect with. I’ve never felt aftergloom: loneliness after a social event when the laughter and chatter has died away. And I don’t suffer evertheless: the fear that this is as good as your life will ever get.

But we’d all connect with different emotions. That’s the power of the book.

What is true for all of us is that when you give a thing a name, you make it real.

STEVE FINAN IN DEFENCE OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE