Blog #
130…June, 2022
Wordl…are
you one of the millions caught up in its challenges (and chance to exercise
your competitive muscle) or maybe you do crosswords, play scrabble or engage
with any of the other games, puzzles and brain teasers involving words – they're fun, distracting
and reputed to ward off cognitive decline.
Words,
words, words! In the past few years, we’ve
imported them - hygge, schadenfreude and
brio from other languages, woke and bespoke from corners of our own. And who knew that someone who took a picture
of themselves with their mobile phone would coin a word that we hear dozens
of times a day? Words change meaning - a thong used to be a rubber sandal coming
up between your toes, an app was a shrimp cocktail, coke was a derivative of coal
or a fizzy drink and a mouse was – well you get it. We avoided anything that was viral and rap
was what we did on the door.
Iceland has
a noun and pronoun for non-binary people. The Inuit have many words for snow
but not one for depression…they call it “thinking a lot and crying.”
If like me,
you’re interested in words and language, I bet you’d welcome The Dictionary of
Obscure Sorrows… sort of a weird title John Koenig chose for his collection of
new words for emotions. As he puts it “to capture the delectable subtleties of
the human experience…to shine a light on the fundamental strangeness of being a
human being.” Here are some of his
creations:
Sonder:
the realization that each random passerby is the main character of their
own story, in which you are just an extra in the background.
Kenopsia: the atmosphere of a place that is usually
bustling with people but is now abandoned and quiet.
Des vu: the awareness that this moment will
become a memory.
Nemotia:
the fear that you’re utterly powerless to change the world around
you…which makes the act of trying to live your own life feel grotesque and self
indulgent.
Ironsick:
feeling hollowed out by excessive exposure to modern technology, which
is so fast and stimulating that it makes everything else feel drab and messy by
comparison…even though your life may be as peaceful and predictable as it’s
ever been.
There’s
something oddly comforting about having words put to experience,“The tiger named is the tiger tamed” a thought that comes to me from the
recesses of memory – there must be a word for that.
Words are
also being joined together in new ways…vaccine hesitancy, replacement theory, fake
news and a host of others. Then there are the acronyms used by tweeters…LOL, LMK, BTW, BBL,
WTF and my favourite, DILLIGAS*- a more nuanced version of whatever.
BIPOC, which
I think in Canada should be IBPOC
And those precious, brave, suffering Ukrainians say рашизм to
describe their enemy attackers, impossible to translate into English, the
closest we can get is a combination of Russian and fascism - ruscism
All these words, phrases, acronyms, in an attempt to capture and
understand our turbo world, we'll be back in July with more of them.
*do I look
like I give a shit?
