7 Deep Feelings You Didn’t Know You Had
Weekly Recap
Authors Note
So it happened again. I've fallen down the rabbit hole of obscure words and can't seem to get out. The only solution is to share what I have read. Who said that sharing your thoughts frees you from them? It seems to have worked last week. I hope it works this week. Let's fall down the rabbit hole of obscure words together, but not before the usual preface.
These words had been invented by the writer John Koenig for The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, these words are meant to fill for the emotions everyone has felt but cannot explain. The project was launched in 2012, only 12 years ago, thus the words had not enough time to develop into what we would call an “official word”. That being said, I could not provide etymology but gave further descriptions instead.
Though these are not real words, I do find a significant meaning behind them. If not use the words themselves, then at least the description would be of immense use. Maybe not in our time, but in some near future, I hope these words will be able to explain what past generations have not.
Words to spice up your writing from the notes series Word of the Day. These 7 words are from the past week all curated here in the weekly word round up. Enjoy!
[23/07/2024]
Gnossienne
noun[nos•yen]
A moment of awareness that someone you’ve known for years still has a private and mysterious inner life
"It wasn't she talked about some concealed secret, nor about her past lovers, but when I saw her brush her hair did the feeling of gnossienne hit me"
Etymology
Borrowed from The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows. The full definition continued from above:
"- and somewhere in the hallways of their personality is a door locked from the inside, a stairway leading to a wing of the house that you’ve never fully explored—an unfinished attic that will remain maddeningly unknowable to you, because ultimately neither of you has a map, or a master key, or any way of knowing exactly where you stand."
[22/07/2024]
Dead reckoning
noun[ded-rek•uhn•ing]
To find yourself bothered by someone’s death more than you would have expected
"I was struck by a dead reckoning following the passing of Queen Elizabeth"
Etymology
Borrowed from The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows. The full definition continued from above:
"-as if you assumed they would always be part of the landscape, like a lighthouse you could pass by for years until the night it suddenly goes dark, leaving you with one less landmark to navigate by—still able to find your bearings, but feeling all that much more adrift."
[21/07/2024]
Rückkehrunruhe
noun[rook•kair•oon•roo•uh]
The feeling of returning home after an immersive trip only to find it fading rapidly from your awareness
"The happiness of the sleepover was quickly replaced by Rückkehrunruhe almost as soon as she returned home"
Etymology
Borrowed from The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows.The full definition continued from above:
"—to the extent you have to keep reminding yourself that it happened at all, even though it felt so vivid just days ago—which makes you wish you could smoothly cross-dissolve back into everyday life, or just hold the shutter open indefinitely and let one scene become superimposed on the next, so all your days would run together and you’d never have to call cut."
[20/07/2024]
Pâro
noun[pahr•oh]
The feeling that everything you do is always somehow wrong
"The only downside to studying physics is the feeling of pâro as reaching one answer will bring about 10 more question"
Etymology
Borrowed from The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows. The full definition continued from above:
"—that there’s nothing you can eat that’s actually healthy, nothing you can say that isn’t problematic, no way to raise your kids that won’t leave them traumatized—which makes you wonder if there’s some obvious way forward that everybody can see but you, each of them leaning back in their chair and calling out helpfully, “Colder... colder... colder..."
[19/07/2024]
Vemödalen
noun[vey•moh•dah•len]
The frustration of photographing something amazing when thousands of identical photos already exist
"rather than feeling a sense of joy on sharing his travels to Instagram, he felt an oppressing sense of vemödalen as he scrolled through people's feeds"
Etymology
Borrowed from The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows.The full definition continued from above:
"—the same sunset, the same waterfall, the same curve of a hip, the same closeup of an eye—which can turn a unique subject into something hollow and pulpy and cheap, like a mass-produced piece of furniture you happen to have assembled yourself."
[18/07/2024]
Occhiolism
noun[oh•kyoh•liz•uhm]
The awareness of the smallness of your perspective
"After reading many detective novels, he was struck by how time and time again, as a result of his occhiolism, he was fooled by the ending"
Etymology
Borrowed from The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows.The full definition continued from above:
"-by which you couldn’t possibly draw any meaningful conclusions at all, about the world or the past or the complexities of culture, because although your life is an epic and unrepeatable anecdote, it still only has a sample size of one, and may end up being the control for a much wilder experiment happening in the next room."
[17/07/2024]
Wytai
noun[wahy•tahy]
A feature of modern society that suddenly strikes you as absurd and grotesque
"only after years-long isolation did the whole wytai of the situation hit her"
Etymology
Borrowed from The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, Wytai is an acronym for When You Think About It. The full definition continued from above:
"—from zoos and milk-drinking to organ transplants, life insurance, and fiction—part of the faint background noise of absurdity that reverberates from the moment our ancestors first crawled out of the slime but could not for the life of them remember what they got up to do."
Vemödalen
I’ve suffered from this one plenty of times. But still, I persist in taking photos. I just don’t look at theirs anymore.
These are brilliant. All of them should be real. In a sense, they are.