BEAUTIFUL WORDS
BUILD A BETTER VOCABULARY
Words posted by @kairosoflife on Twitter
under the hashtag #beautifulwords
This section is still under construction. The word lists are slowly being transferred here from Creativity Chaos
BUILD A BETTER VOCABULARY
Words posted by @kairosoflife on Twitter
under the hashtag #beautifulwords
This section is still under construction. The word lists are slowly being transferred here from Creativity Chaos
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LEARN new words, old words, obscure words and untranslatable words from faraway lands.
OBSCURITY AND SORROW
If you are a logophile you have probably seen the words sonder, onism and vemödalen pop up on blogs with existential definitions you have never read before. Sonder, for example, means the “realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own.”You won’t, however, find it in any dictionary other than the Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows . This original tome was created, along with all the words, by John Koenig. Each neologism aims to fill a need - to give a name to emotions we all might experience but don't yet have a word for. Koenig created his words from detailed research on etymologies and meanings of used prefixes, suffixes, and word roots.
Blogs and and social media have picked up on the more popular words like sonder so I dove deeper into the dictionary and pulled out some beauties that I haven’t seen yet.
Blogs and and social media have picked up on the more popular words like sonder so I dove deeper into the dictionary and pulled out some beauties that I haven’t seen yet.
- Catoptric tristesse: The sadness that you’ll never really know what other people think of you, whether good, bad or if at all—that although we reflect on each other with the sharpness of a mirror, the true picture of how we’re coming off somehow reaches us softened and distorted, as if each mirror was preoccupied with twisting around, desperately trying to look itself in the eye.
- Kenopsia: The eerie, forlorn atmosphere of a place that’s usually bustling with people but is now abandoned and quiet—a school hallway in the evening, an unlit office on a weekend, vacant fairgrounds—an emotional afterimage that makes it seem not just empty but hyper-empty, with a total population in the negative, who are so conspicuously absent they glow like neon signs.
- Anchorage: the desire to hold on to time as it passes, like trying to keep your grip on a rock in the middle of a river, feeling the weight of the current against your chest while your elders float on downstream, calling over the roar of the rapids, “Just let go—it’s okay—let go.
- Heartworm: a relationship or friendship that you can’t get out of your head, which you thought had faded long ago but is still somehow alive and unfinished, like an abandoned campsite whose smoldering embers still have the power to start a forest fire.
- Altschmerz: weariness with the same old issues that you’ve always had—the same boring flaws and anxieties you’ve been gnawing on for years, which leaves them soggy and tasteless and inert, with nothing interesting left to think about, nothing left to do but spit them out and wander off to the backyard, ready to dig up some fresher pain you might have buried long ago
- Nodus tollens: the realization that the plot of your life doesn’t make sense to you anymore—that although you thought you were following the arc of the story, you keep finding yourself immersed in passages you don’t understand, that don’t even seem to belong in the same genre—which requires you to go back and reread the chapters you had originally skimmed to get to the good parts, only to learn that all along you were supposed to choose your own adventure.
- Rigor samsa: a kind of psychological exoskeleton that can protect you from pain and contain your anxieties, but always ends up cracking under pressure or hollowed out by time—and will keep growing back again and again, until you develop a more sophisticated emotional structure, held up by a strong and flexible spine, built less like a fortress than a cluster of treehouses.
STARLIGHT POETRY BY KAI
View Me on Twitter @kairosoflife
See Creativity Chaos - a Creativity Blog by Kai
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© 2019-2020 Copyright Starlight Poetry
View Me on Twitter @kairosoflife
See Creativity Chaos - a Creativity Blog by Kai
Contact | About | Reprints & Copyrights
© 2019-2020 Copyright Starlight Poetry