This morning I came across John Koenig’s Ted Talk “The Conquest of New Words” and it has really got me thinking. “Each of us is undefined, in a way, and the world is becoming ever more undefined,” says John, “And so, I think a lot of the structures that we look to to try to contain ourselves look like this. Both in the sense of ‘pound’ and ‘hashtag.’ It’s trying to box ourselves in certain ways and … to look for certain entries and certain categories and say, ‘Yes, that’s me.'”
John suggests that we often forget that all words are made up and that life is now so complicated and chaotic that we often get too caught up in the models that we’ve imposed on this world that we live in. And that’s why John has created The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows—a dictionary of neologisms for emotions that do not have a descriptive term—so that we could get more in line with how the world actually is.
In this dictionary, there are over 8,000 types of sorrow. In other words, there are over 8,000 reasons why someone would shed a tear. Of course, you might not be able to immediately identify a situation where everyone is talking but nobody is listening as “anecdoche,” but to an extent, we can still improve our emotional granularity.
I’d like to invite you to do an exercise with me. Think of a time when you felt angry or sad, and describe it in greater detail. After you have done this exercise, you might realize that you have the potential to possess higher emotional granularity in you, even if you can’t remember the 8,000 terms for obscure sorrows 🙂
Mena's Little Corner 