19 new words for fears from The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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.