New Words For Complex Feelings

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Most languages have at least a handful of words for emotions that don’t exist in English. For instance, take the Portuguese saudade. It roughly translates to “the vague and constant desire for something that does not and probably cannot exist.” Put aside whatever you think about those wimpy Portuguese for just one second and think about how this affects Y-O-U. If you buy into the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis and you’re at a restaurant, you’re probably like “Waiter! Let’s get some new words for our complex feelings so we can have more emotionally enriched lives, stat.” Well, I’m working on it.

Crendle: The momentary anger you feel towards yourself when a piece of toast resembles a celebrity but you don’t realize it until after you’ve eaten it.

Tchitchkhna: The order in which your mind assembles the narrative of Dante’s Peak when you watch the second half of it on FX, and then it’s playing again so you watch the first half.

Grunth: The mix of anger, frustration and self-consciousness when a service employee who reminds you of a slightly older version of yourself calls you “little guy.”

Phub: The complex rollercoaster of emotions experienced when you have a dream about growing huge muscles, and then you wake up and realize that somehow in the night you really did get huge muscles, but then it turns it was a two-leveled dream.

UuLlAaLlAa: The tortured pride you feel when you’re writing a ground-breaking article and you want to include a little meta-joke about writing the article, but you stop yourself, but then you’re doing it anyway and you didn’t even realize it.

Dii-Dii: The calm, welcoming embrace of death that sits in your stomach when you have eaten IKEA meatballs every day for a week.

Honkadooie: The peculiar sensation of putting your finger so far up your nose that you can touch your brain and re-live parts of your past based on which neurons you touch (they do this for fun in China because they have a word for it).

Hammy-Sammy-Honkadooie: The act of performing honkadooie while eating a ham sandwich (see: Honkadooie).

Oh Man: The deep desire to forget that you once cried while rocking out to “I’m Not Okay” by My Chemical Romance because you thought you were alone in the locker room but there were like three other guys in there and one of them recorded it on his primitive camera phone. And you can’t forget. You can never forget.

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image – Greeblie