New words to give a name to our emotions

[Sora]

Human beings are capable of feeling more emotions than there ever can be words to describe them. While "Happiness" and "Sadness" are two very basic and all encompassing words that we often substitute and throw around with "thrill", "joy", "exhilaration", "gloom",  "melancholy", "blue", etc to accommodate our feelings into verbal communication, sometimes, it seems like there are absolutely no words in the system of languages that can express exactly what we feel. While surfing the internet, I came across an interesting article on BuzzFeed where the author had put together a list of 23  words that might help to fill the hole in language trajectory. I tried to locate the etymological origins of the words which led me to this fantastic website that called itself  The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows. John Koenig, a graphic designer and editor by profession, has come up with a project where he tries to put a name to the varied kinds of emotions we feel. 

While on the one hand, it seems implausible that these words will ever enter mainstream language systems or be endorsed by popular, canonical dictionaries, I can't help but laud this man on his ingenious endeavor to make more expressible words available to express ourselves. I can only hope that more and more people come to know bout him and use his words. The emotions that describes are nuanced moments that all of us have felt at some point or the other. 

Following are the links to the BuzzFeed list and Koenig's site.

BuzzFeed's list of 23 words

John Koenig's Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows

Do let me know what you think. 

[czarina84]

I like the fact that he created new words.  Most of the "new words" that were added to the dictionary in the past few years are just abbreviations or words that were mashed together.  This actually looks like it took some thought. 

[Wanda Kaishin]

Not a fan. English already has more dictionary entries than any other language, and every language has shortfalls, so why be different? There's nothing wrong with using 2 or 3 words if one won't suffice, and I feel he's really stretching it on a lot of those words.

[anna3101]

The idea is interesting, but as I have learnt time and again, most people (myself included) have hard time managing even those emotion-words that already exist. I don't think we need even more!

Try to decipher what you are feeling this moment, and already it's not that easy. I had cognitive behavioral therapy a couple of years ago, and describing emotions was one of the weekly tasks. I even had a cheat sheet from my psychologist, with all the words describing emotions And I've always thought of myself as quite talkative and having no problems whatsoever with words but it really is difficult to describe whatever is inside yourself on an average and ordinary day.

To cut a long story short, I think we already have quite a lot of those words