There is an interesting little book from 2021 by John Koenig
titled The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows with new words for describing emotions.
On July 31, 2024 I blogged about it in a post titled Momophobia is the fear of
speaking off the cuff (impromptu speaking) which included a half-dozen other fears
with -phobia endings.
His book contains six main sections titled as follows:
1] Between Living and Dreaming (seeing the world as it is, and
the world as it could be) – page 1
2] The Interior Wilderness (defining who you are from the
inside out) – page 43
3] Montage of Attractions (finding shelter in the presence of
others) – page 81
4] Faces in a Crowd (catching glimpses of humanity from a distance)
– page 119
5] Boats Against the Current (holding on in the rush of the
moment) – page 157
6] Roll the Bones (connecting the dots of a wide-open universe)
– page 209
There are 19 other fears in the book (mostly nouns, listed
in alphabetical order):
aimonomia - page 219
the fear that learning the name of something - a bird, a
constellation, an attractive stranger - will somehow ruin it, inadvertently
transforming a lucky discovery into a conceptual husk pinned in a glass case,
leaving one less mystery fluttering around in the universe.
alazia - page 63
The fear that you’re no longer able to change.
anaphasia - page 138
the fear that your society is breaking apart into factions
that have nothing left in common with each other - each defending their own set
of values, referring to their own cult figures, speaking in their own
untranslatable language.
caucic - page 236 (adj.)
afraid that the rest of your life is already laid out in
front of you, that you’re being swept inexorably along a series of predictable
milestones - from school to graduation to career to marriage to kids to
retirement to death - which makes you wish you could pull off to the side of
the road for a little while, to stretch your legs and spread out the map so you
can double-check that you’re headed the right way.
elosy - page 215
the fear of major life changes, even ones you’ve been
anticipating for years; the dread of leaving behind the bright and ordinary
world you know, stepping out into that liminal space before the next stage of
life begins, like the dark and rattling void between adjoining metro cars.
evertheless - page 241
the fear that this is ultimately as good as your life is
ever going to get - that the ebb and flow of your fortunes is actually just now
hitting its high-water mark, and soon enough you’ll sense the tide of life
slowly begin to recede.
That emotion was discussed in the song Is That All There Is?
feresy - page 90
the fear that your partner is changing in ways you don’t
understand, even though they might be changes for the better, because it forces
you to wonder whether your relationship needs a few careful nudges to fall back
into balance, or perhaps is still as stable as ever, but involves a person who
no longer exists.
harmonoia - page 31
an itchy sense of dread when life feels just a hint too
peaceful - when everyone seems to get along suspiciously well, with an eerie
stillness that makes you want to brace for the inevitable collapse, or burn it
down yourself.
indosentia - page 73
the fear that your emotions might feel profound but are
crudely biological, less to do with meaning and philosophy than with hormones,
endorphins, sleep cycles, and blood sugar - any of which might easily be
tweaked to induce unfalsifiable feelings of joy, depression, bloodlust, or
kinship, or even a spiritual transcendence of your physical body.
kadot - page 218
fear of the prospect of not existing one day, feeling like a
student about to graduate from the universe, on the cusp of a transition you
don’t feel ready for.
karanoia – page 238
the terror of the blank page, which can feel both liberating
and confining, in both the limitlessness of its potential and the looseness of
its boundaries.
lyssamania – page 53
the irrational fear that someone you know is angry at you,
that as soon as you wander into the room, you’ll be faced with a barrage of
questions that gradually escalates into a frenzy of outrage, for reasons that
you don’t understand.
maugry – page 57 (adj.)
afraid that you’ve been mentally deranged all your life and
everybody around you knows, but none of them mention it to you directly because
they feel it’s not their place.
nemotia - page 225
the fear that you’re utterly powerless to change the world
around you, looking on helplessly at so many intractable problems out there - slums
that sprawl from horizon to horizon, daily headlines of an unstoppable civil
war, a slick of air pollution blanketing the skyline -which makes the act of
trying to live your own life feel grotesque and self-indulgent, as if you’re
rubbernecking through the world.
ochisia - page 91
the fear that the role you once occupied in someone’s life
could be refilled without a second thought, which makes you wish that every
breakup would include a severance package, a non-compete clause, and some sort
of romantic placement program.
treachery of the common - page 32
the fear that everyone around the world is pretty much the
same—that despite our local quirks, we were all mass-produced in the same factory,
built outward from the same generic homunculus, preinstalled with the same
tribal compulsions and character defects—which would leave you out of options
if you ever want to reinvent yourself, or seek out a better society on the
other side of the globe.
vaucasy – page 45
the fear that you’re little more than a product of your
circumstances, that for all the thought you put into shaping your beliefs and
behaviors and relationships, you’re essentially a dog being trained by whatever
stimuli you happen to encounter—reflexively drawn to whoever gives you reliable
hits of pleasure, skeptical of ideas that make you feel powerless.
vemodalen - page 7
the fear that originality is no longer possible.
zielschmerz - page 33
the dread of finally pursuing a lifelong dream, which
requires you to put your true abilities out there to be tested on the open
savannah, no longer protected inside the terrarium of hopes and delusions that
you started up in kindergarten and kept sealed as long as you could.
Another interesting word is ludiosis (page 125), defined as:
“the sense that you’re just making it up as you go along - knowing
that if someone asked why you do most things, you couldn’t really come up with
a convincing explanation.”
You might not think any more than before blowing a soap
bubble, as shown above. A Tori Amos song, Gold Dust has lyrics saying:
“And we make it up as we go along, we make it up as we go
along”
Images of sorrow and bubble blowing both came from
Wikimedia Commons.
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