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An Emotional Dictionary

Real Words for How You Feel, from Angst to Zwodder

Susie Dent

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24 quotes

language-arts

id introduction

  • Fairy tales as usual go straight to the heart of things: recent research has made it clear that the ability to ‘name’ how we feel is directly proportional to our happiness. What is at play here is our ‘emotional granularity’, a term coined by psychology professor Lisa Feldman Barrett whose work has shown that those who draw on a wider range of vocabulary to express their emotions are far more able to cope with them. Emodiverse people are less likely to lash out in anger (or hit the bottle in misery) and much less likely to visit the doctor. Those with a high EQ are apparently happier, healthier, and more popular than the rest of us. You are what you feel, as long as you can describe it.Nov 15 2023 5:33PM
  • But what exactly is an emotion? Is it an inner sensation, or more of a social scenario? Are emotions innate, or a way of behaving that we learn as we grow up? Do we feel something and then name it, or is it the other way round? Until the nineteenth century, the word boredom didn’t exist: so did listlessness feel different before then, when it was expressed as the more languishing world-weary ennui?Nov 15 2023 5:33PM
  • Similarly, while yawning today may be a sign of tiredness or boredom, a yawner amidst Shakespeare’s contemporaries was more likely to be open-mouthed with astonishment. Earlier still, such noisy ‘oscitation’ risked opening oneself up to the devil (think of ‘the yawning gates of Hell’), while French troubadours in the twelfth century would yawn vigorously to demonstrate the depths of their love. Our emotions, and our bodily responses to them, are as fluid and inconstant as we are.Nov 15 2023 5:34PM
  • Some, like desiderate (to long for something now lost), have been languishing and forgotten for centuries, while others need to be borrowed from different languages – those like the evocative Japanese description of making too-frequent trips to the fridge: kuchisabishii, whose literal translation is ‘lonely mouth’.Nov 15 2023 5:35PM
  • As for the names of those six basic emotions, while their meanings may have shifted, they still do their job. But, as the narrator of Jeffrey Eugenides’ novel Middlesex points out, they are never going to be enough. ‘I’d like to have at my disposal complicated hybrid emotions, Germanic train-car constructions like, say, “the happiness that attends disaster”. Or: “the disappointment of sleeping with one’s fantasy.” I’d like to show how “intimations of mortality brought on by aging family members” connects with “the hatred of mirrors that begins in middle age” . . . I’ve never had the right words to describe my life, and now that I’ve entered my story, I need them more than ever.’Nov 15 2023 5:36PM
  • A lexicon of lost positives is waiting, like Superman in the ice, to be brought back to life. Take words such as ‘gormless’, ‘feckless’, and ‘disgruntled’: they are the dark offspring of terms that once described hopeful and happy states of mind. You might be gruntled or gormful, or full of ruth and feck.Nov 15 2023 5:37PM
  • As the story of Rumpelstiltskin shows, the power of a true name can break an evil spell. We just need to choose our words better. If ever there was a time to release the magic of respair, it is surely now.Nov 15 2023 5:37PM

id a

  • The concept of Angst was central to the work of the existential philosopher Søren Kierkegaard. He argued that an individual only becomes truly aware of their potential through the experience of Angst, because ‘Whoever has learned to be anxious in the right way has learned the ultimate.’ If you stand and look over a cliff’s edge, you fear falling but also recognize the opportunity to jump. Kierkegaard believed we experience the same dual response when confronting every significant choice, describing it as ‘the dizziness of freedom’. Angst, he believed, needs to be embraced, because restricting ourselves to the safe and the ordinary means living a lie. Arguably this was something that Kierkegaard pursued in his own life, when, at great personal cost, he deliberately decided not to marry his childhood sweetheart, Regine Olsen, and to dedicate his life instead to philosophy.Nov 15 2023 5:38PM
  • apanthropy: an aversion to others and love of solitude. Between loneliness and aloneness lies an ocean of difference, and each has its own, very distinct thesaurus. ‘Apanthropy’ belongs firmly in the latter camp – it is voluntary solitude, born of a desire not just to be by oneself, but to be free from the intrusion of other people. It is made up of the Greek apo, ‘away from’, and anthrōpos, ‘man’. In a medical glossary of 1839, ‘apanthropy’ is neatly defined as ‘a species of melancholy characterised by a dislike to society’. It is, in other words, the state of being ‘peopled out’. Any modern ‘humgruffin’ or misanthrope will relate to that.Nov 15 2023 5:40PM
  • apophenia: the tendency to perceive meaningful connections between random things. ‘Apophenia’ is often linked to gambling, where a random outcome can appear to be dictated by preceding events. If, for example, three coin-tosses reveal three successive ‘tails’, it can seem more likely to the gambler that the next coin-toss will reveal itself to be ‘heads’, despite bearing an unchanging per cent statistical likelihood. In other words, apophenia is a reflection of the human need to find connections, even in entirely unrelated information.Nov 15 2023 5:41PM
  • l’appel du vide [French: la’pell du veed]: the call of the void. The French have an affinity with the abyss and its hypnotic effects. They have, for example, a term for the reproduction of an object within an object, often in endless reflections that recede into infinity. This is mise en abîme, meaning ‘placed into the abyss’ – you will find it on the cover for Pink Floyd’s album Ummagumma, which utilizes the infinity effect through a large mirror. An even more evocative term is l’appel du vide, ‘the call of the void’, which describes the impulse to jump off a cliff as you stare down from its summit, or to drive into the path of oncoming traffic. It can be as strong as it is irrational, and thankfully few of us give in to it. But the mind is seduced by the abyss as if by some strange compulsion, perhaps as a reverse affirmation of the desire to live. We consider doing something life-destroying precisely in order to dismiss it and appreciate life more fully.Nov 15 2023 5:41PM

id b

  • bào fù xìng áo yè [Chinese: pao fu hsing ao yeh]: staying awake as revenge. When we feel an inability to control the world around us, we tend to turn to things closer to home. We might choose, for example, to stay up far too late as a way of regaining an ounce of the freedom we feel has been denied to us during the day. The Chinese have an expression for exactly this. Bào fù xìng áo yè translates as ‘suffering through the night vengefully’ – in other words, this is revenge bedtime procrastination.Nov 15 2023 5:42PM

id c

  • cacoethes [ka-ko-ee-theez]: the irresistible desire to do something unwise. Few words beginning with ‘cac’ or ‘kak’ in English promise anything positive, for kakos, their root, is Greek for ‘bad’. A ‘cacophony’ is a discordant din, while a ‘kakistocracy’ is a government run by the worst of citizens. ‘Cacoethes’ is no exception. Borrowed directly from the Greek kakoēthes, ‘an ill habit or itch’, the term perfectly describes the compulsion to behave in a way you know will ultimately do you no good whatsoever.Nov 15 2023 6:46PM
  • catchfart: a servant; one who follows the political wind. We have all encountered a ‘catchfart’ or two – the obsequious individual who sucks up to anyone they consider important. This pungent term, which dates back to the seventeenth century, began as a mocking nickname for a foot-servant, specifically one who followed their master or mistress so closely that they were in the firing line for a lot more than they bargained for.Nov 15 2023 6:48PM
  • cavoli riscaldati [Italian: ka-vo-li ris-kal-da-ti]: the pointless attempt to revive a romance. The temptation to return to a former love affair, and the blind confidence that all the problems that once defined it will have completely disappeared, is known in Italian as cavoli riscaldati – literally ‘reheated cabbage’. In other words, the promise of something delicious turns out to be entirely misplaced.Nov 15 2023 6:48PM
  • cheugy [chew-gee]: demonstrating the need to try too hard. ‘Cheugy’ is said to have been the confection of a US high school student, who was searching for a new adjective to describe something off-trend and uncool, as seen in those who feel compelled to try too hard. Those who are ‘cheugy’ are consequently ‘cheugs’: behind the times or offputtingly conventional. To quote the New York Times, if you have a ‘Keep Calm and Carry On’ poster in your bedroom, call your friend a ‘bestie’, or announce the end of the week as Fri-yay, then you are probably a ‘cheug’.Nov 15 2023 6:49PM
  • coddiwomple: to travel purposefully without a clear destination.Nov 15 2023 6:50PM
  • ‘Coddiwompling’, to give it its popular definition, is to ‘travel in a purposeful manner towards a destination as yet unknown’. It is, in other words, all about the journey, which makes it a cousin of such words as ‘roaming’ and ‘roving’, or the Irish seachrán, to ‘wander’ or ‘stray’. Whilst all of these suggest something aimless and dawdling, however, ‘coddiwompling’ has far more determination. You may not know where you’re going, but wherever it is, you’ll get there.Nov 15 2023 6:50PM
  • crapulent: hungover.Dec 31 2023 12:58PM

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id f

  • flapdoodle: stuff and nonsense. As dismissive verbal swipes go, ‘flapdoodle’ is one of the best. A fanciful coinage from the 1830s, it joins ‘pish’, ‘twaddle’, ‘balderdash’, ‘humbug’, ‘flim-flam’, ‘fiddle-daddle’, and countless other articulations of absolute rubbish.Dec 31 2023 1:03PM

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