Sometimes there are no words
And sometimes there are, and sometimes we just have to make them up as we go
One way to start a literary-ish newsletter is to talk about words.
On the day her 16-year-old daughter obtained her driver’s license and drove off into the sunset by herself, my friend Shawna uttered these words: “There are no words.”
It’s a common refrain; sometimes, there are no words to describe a thing, feeling, or desire accurately. We stand there, our mouths agape. No words.
We don’t always need a specific word to describe everything that overcomes us. We can feel it, note it, move on. We can opine that the emotion was “love,” “a thrill,” or “amazing.” Those are perfectly fine words. We use them all the time, among other simple, perfectly fine words that sort of mean what we’re trying to convey. “Wow, that photo is ‘amazing,’” we might say, or “this story is ‘heartwrenching,’” or “the way summer is ending too soon and while I am looking forward to the cool winds of autumn, I am not quite ready to give up my sandals for boots yet is ‘….’” - well? What is that? What is the word for that? We can make up phrases about it to describe the feeling. But I can’t think of an actual word that can accurately depict it - a slow, slow letting go? No, that’s five words. Bittersweet? Maybe, but not quite. The feeling is just what it is, and let’s leave it at that. No words.
A Vocabulary from a New Perspective
But damn, what if we could create a word for it? Or what if there is, in fact, a word for it in the English language or even another language? John Koenig notes in his book, The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows,
“It’s a calming thing, to learn there’s a word for something you’ve felt all your life but didn’t know was shared by anyone else. It’s even oddly empowering—to be reminded that you’re not alone, you’re not crazy, you’re just an ordinary human being trying to make your way through a bizarre set of circumstances.”
The book began as a Tumblr account over a decade ago and was born from his excitement in learning that there were words in other languages for things he felt: hygge, saudade, duende, ubuntu. Koenig, a graphic designer and filmmaker, says he continually found blind spots in the language of emotion, especially, sadly, in the English language. He says,
“We have thousands of words for different types of finches and schooners and historical undergarments, but only a rudimentary vocabulary to capture the delectable subtleties of the human experience.”
“Words will never do us justice,” he says. “But we have to try anyway.” And so he does try, creating a dictionary of new words to fill in the gaps, a dictionary from a new perspective, and boy, are there some good words here (mind you, they won’t appear in any other dictionary but this one; maybe someday.) Here are just a few of my favorites:
wildred - adj. feeling the haunting solitude of extremely remote places — a clearing in the forest, a windswept field of snow, a rest area in the middle of nowhere —which makes you feel like you’ve just intruded on a conversation that had nothing to do with you, where even the gravel beneath your feet and the trees overhead are holding themselves back to a pointed, inhospitable silence. (From wild+dread.)
ne’er be gone - n. a person who has no idea where their home is, or was, or when they might have left it —which leaves their emotional compass free to swing around wildly as they move from place to place, pulling them everywhere and nowhere all at once, making it that much harder to navigate. (Middle English naur, nowhere + begone, surrounded.)
funkenzwangsvorstellung - n. the primal trance of watching a campfire in the dark. (German Funken, spark + Zwangsvorstellung, obsession. Pronounced “foon-ken-tsvang-svohr-steloong.”)
typifice - n. a caricature of yourself that went out of date years ago, though nobody around you seems to have noticed. (Italian tipi fissi, “fixed types,” the stock characters in commedia dell’arte masked improvisational theater. Pronounced “tip-uh-fis.”)
Beautiful, Untranslatable Words
Another beautifully illustrated book, Lost in Translation: An Illustrated Compendium of Untranslatable Words from Around the World, by Ella Frances Sanders, who also brought us Eating the Sun: Small Musings on a Vast Universe, as well as a host of other unique word-related books, offers up a treasury of words in various other languages. The feeling of being moved to tears by something heartwarming? That can be the Italian verb commuovere
The act of staying up late with friends and having a good time? Well, I suppose the word “partying” can suffice. But a night up laughing, joking, talking, and playing dominos with friends or family isn’t necessarily partying. In Arabic, there is a word for it. It’s samar, a more poetic, all-encompassing term that means staying up late long after the sun has gone down and having an enjoyable time with friends and family where you talk for hours, drink too much, and don’t notice as day turns to night.
Language evolves from culture, and each culture develops a language reflective of it. The Japanese, for example, who have a collective cultural practice of appreciating the present moment, have a word for how the sunlight filters through the leaves of trees: komorebi. The Native American Indian languages reflect their connection to nature (the Ojibwe word, minwaanimad means calm or peaceful air, and the Cherokee word, oginalli means a deep connection to all living things.)
Real, New Words
Is the feeling of not wanting summer to end but wanting autumn to start, but not really just a feeling that doesn’t need a word? (Probably. I’m just using it as an example.) Merriam-Webster included 690 NEW words into its dictionary this past year. The process is painstaking, and no word added is taken lightly. Dictionary compilers, professionally known as lexicographers, take even more time to determine what words to remove from the dictionary. A few words that got the nod: rizz (unfortunately, it was inevitable, I guess), zhuzh (I must admit I love this word, and yes, we needed it badly), mid (inevitable again, I use it jokingly with my kids but it’s a non-funny accurate word in their slang/lexicon), jorts (really? was this necessary?), and nyctinasty (at first glance, I thought this was a word describing some sort of New York City dynasty/fantasy or nastiness but is, in fact, a beautiful word that describes a plant’s movement.)
Words that were removed? Sadly, hodad (a word derived in the 1960s that meant a person pretending to be a surfer dude) took its lexical last breath, along with snollygoster (an unscrupulous politician who wins by voter fraud, eek), and sternforemost (an 1800s nautical term that fell out of use.) For more removed words, check out Joe Gillard’s book, The Little Book of Lost Words: Collywobbles, Snollygosters, and 86 Other Surprisingly Useful Terms Worth Resurrecting.
But outside of these new “actual” words we can now find in the dictionary, there are a gazillion (the silly word gazillion does not denote an actual number; there is no number known as a gazillion — it isn’t more than a million or a billion—gazillion just means “a whole bunch”) other made up words people use every day. There are words that family members and friends concoct between themselves: noodle mcshnoodle, razzleberry, cutemshpa. Some of these fabricated words make it out into the world. My mom used to say, “Boy, that’s the pits,” which meant something was a real bummer. At some point, she noticed other people saying it. And she henceforth prided herself on bringing the slang word “the pits” into our mainstream vocabulary. (Please nod and agree; no use arguing with her ;)) Who was the first kid to start saying “rizz”? And wasn’t it one of the guys on the reality hit TV show Queer Eye for the Straight Guy who first “zhuzhed” something? Nyctinasty was borrowed from the German word nyctinastisch, probably, possibly because English-speaking botanists were tired of having to say things like: “The plant reoriented its leaves due to the changes of light intensity after we set the clocks back” rather than just saying, “the plant displayed nyctinasty after we changed the clocks back.”
And the Words We’ve Forgotten…
Some beautiful, fun, creative words are sadly forgotten and fall out of use. Different words have come into our lexicon, especially words to describe technology, while words and slang used on a steamship aren’t said much anymore. Language is constantly evolving, changing, and growing. But there is a book for those forgotten words! And that book is The Cabinet of Linguistic Curiosities: A Yearbook of Forgotten Words by Paul Anthony Jones. (Don't worry; I’ll include a list of all the books I mention at the end of the newsletter.)
He offers a new, old, unused word (some have been removed from dictionaries, some have not) for each day of the calendar year. The word for 28 August is petty-dancers (n.).
A few other good ones he includes: pot-valor—courage or boldness induced by drinking; panshite—a state of panic, confusion, or uproar; decussate—to mark with an X; anfract—a winding or circuitous route; lown—a calm or quiet state, an area of tranquil seas. There are more than 365 words plus histories of each for context in the book.
Words are powerful tools that help us navigate the complexities of human emotion and experience. Language remains a living, breathing testament to our shared humanity. Sometimes, the magic lies not just in the words themselves but in the search for them.
And finally, after just a little bit of digging, I found an almost perfect word for my bittersweet feeling about summer ending and fall beginning. It’s the Welsch term hiraeth, which conveys a deep longing or nostalgia for a place, time, or feeling often tinged with sadness and bittersweet anticipation. I feel like Charlie Brown in the old TV special, A Charlie Brown Christmas, when Lucy offers him the perfect word for what he’s feeling—” That’s it!”
Links to books, etc.
The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows by John Koenig
The Cabinet of Linguistic Curiosities: A Yearbook of Forgotten Words by Paul Anthony Jones
Lost in Translation: An Illustrated Compendium of Untranslatable Words from Around the World by Ella Frances Sanders
Eating the Sun: Small Musings on a Vast Universe by Ella Frances Sanders
The Little Book of Lost Words: Collywobbles, Snollygosters, and 86 Other Surprisingly Useful Terms Worth Resurrecting by Joe Gillard
Other-Wordly: words both strange and lovely from around the world by Yee-Lum Mak - I didn’t mention this one in the newsletter, but it’s another beautiful book in my library that includes obscure real words with pretty illustrations.
-A Reddit discussion on very specific feelings or emotions that do not exist in the English dictionary.
-Abraham Piper is fun to listen to as he talks about language. Smart but self-deprecating.
-More good words here: aesthetic_logophile
That’s it. Look for an intro to The Chapterhouse Literary Social newsletter that will hit your inbox soon. And I’ll be back next week with another edition of the Chapterhouse newsletter! Thank you so very much for reading. I hope I inspired you to start making up words.:)
If you enjoy reading this week’s Chapterhouse, please “like” this post, leave a comment, or share it with a friend. Thanks so much!