3 New Words for Emotions That We All Feel, But Can’t Explain

We feel more than what the English language and words offer us, but sometimes we come across a certain emotion that we want to describe to a friend or family member and can’t.

John Koenig, a graphic designer, editor, and voice performer from Minnesota, published The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows.

Koenig complied groups of different words he invented himself and gave all of them their own unique definition.

Have you ever had the devotion for a disaster or something extreme to happen to you? That means you experienced “lachesism.

Lachesism:

n. the desire to be struck by disaster, to survive a plane crash, to lose everything in a fire, to plunge over a waterfall, which would put a kink in the smooth arc of your life, and forge it into something hardened and flexible and sharp, not just a stiff prefabricated beam that barely covers the gap between one end of your life and the other.

Imagine walking down the long halls of an airport, seeing hundreds of passports in peoples’ hands as they rush to catch their flight. Someone is flying to see a loved one, someone is going to a funeral, someone is about to get engaged, everyone is living different lives.

 Ever wonder how your own life would be if you got stuck in a different body? This is called “onism.”

 Onism:

n. the frustration of being stuck in just one body, that inhabits only one place at a time.

 Being numb to an emotion or feeling is normal. This means you are experiencing “exulansis.”

 Exulansis:

n. the tendency to give up trying to talk about an experience because people are unable to relate to it, whether through envy or pity or simple foreignness, which allows it to drift away from the rest of your life story, until the memory itself feels out of place, almost mythical, wandering restlessly in the fog, no longer even looking for a place to land.