The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows

I recently came across this YouTube channel called ‘The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows’ by Jon
Koenig. The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows is a compendium of invented words written by John
Koenig. Each original definition aims to fill a hole in the language—to give a name to emotions
we all might experience but don’t yet have a word for. This is a web series for newly invented
words for strangely intense emotions which have not been termed yet. Each sorrow is bagged,
tagged and tranquilized, then released gently back into the subconsciousAll the words are made
up though they all are based on existing roots and are not nonsensical.

This concept recognizes such beautiful and powerful emotions, emotions we all experience at
some point in our life. Each original definition aims to fill a hole in the language. The author's
mission is to capture the aches, demons, joys and urges that roam the contours of our
psychological insides.

I wish it wasn’t so ineffable to describe how beautifully haunting these words are. I think we all
experience certain waves of sentiments and the very fact that we can’t term them helps us in
suppressing them or turning a blind eye to them. Heads up, these words might make you go
through another existential crisis or might just help you get over one. Some of these words don’t
just fill a hole in the language, they fill a hole which you have been avoiding to come in terms
with.

This is certainly one of the most beautiful things I have come across on YouTube. You can also
check this out on http://www.dictionaryofobscuresorrows.com/

Here are a few of my favourite words:

1. Sonder

n. the realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own.
You are the main character—the protagonist—the star at the center of your own unfolding
story. You’re surrounded by your supporting cast: friends and family hanging in your immediate
orbit. Scattered a little further out, a network of acquaintances who drift in and out of contact
over the years.
But there in the background, faint and out of focus, are the extras. The random passersby. Each
living a life as vivid and complex as your own. They carry on invisibly around you, bearing the
accumulated weight of their own ambitions, friends, routines, mistakes, worries, triumphs and
inherited craziness. When your life moves on to the next scene, theirs flickers in place, wrapped
in a cloud of backstory and inside jokes and characters strung together with countless other
stories you’ll never be able to see. That you’ll never know exists.
In which you might appear only once. As an extra sipping coffee in the background. As a blur of
traffic passing on the highway. As a lighted window at dusk.

2. 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.

3. Onism

The awareness that how little of the word you’ll experience

n. the frustration of being stuck in just one body, that inhabits only one place at a time, which is
like standing in front of the departures screen at an airport, flickering over with strange place
names like other people's passwords, each representing one more thing you'll never get to see
before you die-and all because, as the arrow on the map helpfully points out, you are here.

4. yù yī - 玉衣

the desire to feel intensely again

n. the desire to see with fresh eyes, and feel things just as intensely as you did when you were
younger—before expectations, before memory, before words

5. Klexos:

The Art of Dwelling on the Past

Your life is written in indelible ink. There's no going back to erase the past, tweak your mistakes,
or fill in missed opportunities. When the moment’s over, your fate is sealed. But if look closer,
you notice the ink never really dries on any our experiences. They can change their meaning the
longer you look at them.

7. liberosis
n. the desire to care less about things—to loosen your grip on your life, to stop glancing behind
you every few steps, afraid that someone will snatch it from you before you reach the end zone—
rather to hold your life loosely and playfully, like a volleyball, keeping it in the air, with only
quick fleeting interventions, bouncing freely in the hands of trusted friends, always in play.

8. vemödalen
n. the frustration of photographing something amazing when thousands of identical photos
already exist—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

10. nighthawk
n. a recurring thought that only seems to strike you late at night—an overdue task, a nagging
guilt, a looming and shapeless future—that circles high overhead during the day, that pecks at the
back of your mind while you try to sleep, that you can successfully ignore for weeks, only to feel
its presence hovering outside the window, waiting for you to finish your coffee, passing the time
by quietly building a nest.

11.mal de coucou:
n. a phenomenon in which you have an active social life but very few close friends—people who
you can trust, who you can be yourself with, who can help flush out the weird psychological
toxins that tend to accumulate over time—which is a form of acute social malnutrition in
which even if you devour an entire buffet of chitchat, you’ll still feel pangs of hunger.

12.keyframe
n. a moment that seemed innocuous at the time but ended up marking a diversion into a strange
new era of your life—set in motion not by a series of jolting epiphanies but by tiny imperceptible
differences between one ordinary day and the next, until entire years of your memory can be
compressed into a handful of indelible images—which prevents you from rewinding the past, but
allows you to move forward without endless buffering.

13. vellichor
n. the strange wistfulness of used bookstores, which are somehow infused with the passage of
time—filled with thousands of old books you’ll never have time to read, each of which is itself
locked in its own era, bound and dated and papered over like an old room the author abandoned
years ago, a hidden annex littered with thoughts left just as they were on the day they were
captured.

But in the end I guess, words will never succeed in describing human experience because don’t
you feel speechless after certain experiences? Maybe not being able to term an emotion should
also have a term.