Words!
Ineffability is the quality of something, some state, some awareness that goes beyond our ability to express it in language. Examples include the color red, the taste of watermelon, and the joy at the sight of one’s children.
Some don’t believe there is anything ineffable. They may argue that, in fact, I have just described these qualities with language. But have I really? How would you describe “red” to someone color blind to red? Hot? Bright? On the other end of the color spectrum from blue? This does not do it justice. How would you describe the taste and texture of watermelon? Clean, metallic, both soft and crisp?
Words rule our lives. They tame our lives. Finding the right word at the right moment can bring a feeling of ease and satisfaction like no other. “You nailed it!” we say to someone in a conversation when we feel particularly relieved that finally we are agreeing on “what is.”
In a recent piece in The Marginalian (a wonderful blog I’ve mentioned before), Maria Popova writes, "Each word is a portable cathedral in which we clarify and sanctify our experience, a reliquary, and a laboratory, holding the history of our search for meaning and the pliancy of the possible future, of there being richer and deeper dimensions of experience than those we name in our surface impressions.”
She goes on, "In the roots of words, we find a portal to the mycelial web of invisible connections undergirding our emotional lives — the way “sadness” shares a Latin root with “sated” and originally meant a fulness of experience, the way “holy” shares a Latin root with “whole” and has its Indo-European origins in the notion of the interleaving of all things.”
In this post, Maria reviews a book by John Koenig titled The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows.
Maria notes some of her favorite words in the book, all of which are new to me. Wonderful words. Words such as:
MARU MORI - the heartbreaking simplicity of ordinary things
APOLYTUS - the moment you realize you are changing as a person, finally outgrowing your old problems like a reptile shedding its skin
THE WENDS - the frustration that you’re not enjoying an experience as much as you should… as if your heart had been inadvertently demagnetized by a surge of expectations
ANOSCETIA - the anxiety of not knowing ‘the real you"
D’ES VU - the awareness that this moment will become a memory.
Aren’t these delightful? Let’s do it some more. Some words of time and love:
ÉNOUEMENT
n. the bittersweetness of having arrived here in the future, finally learning the answers to how things turned out but being unable to tell your past self.
French énouer, to pluck defective bits from a stretch of cloth + dénouement, the final part of a story, in which all the threads of the plot are drawn together and everything is explained. Pronounced “ey-noo-mahn.”
QUERINOUS
adj. longing for a sense of certainty in a relationship; wishing there were some way to know ahead of time whether this is the person you’re going to wake up next to for twenty thousand mornings in a row, instead of having to count them out one by one, quietly hoping your streak continues.
Mandarin 确认 (quèrèn), confirmation. Twenty thousand days is roughly fifty-five years. Pronounced “kweh-ruh-nuhs.”
Or these words about self-knowledge:
AGNOSTHESIA
n. the state of not knowing how you really feel about something, which forces you to sift through clues hidden in your own behavior, as if you were some other person — noticing a twist of acid in your voice, an obscene amount of effort you put into something trifling, or an inexplicable weight on your shoulders that makes it difficult to get out of bed.
Ancient Greek ἄγνωστος (ágnōstos), not knowing + διάθεσις (diáthesis), condition, mood. Pronounced “ag-nos-thee-zhuh.”
ZIELSCHMERZ
n. 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.
German Ziel, goal + Schmerz, pain. Pronounced “zeel-shmerts.”
Words about the wonder of life:
GALAGOG
n. the state of being simultaneously entranced and unsettled by the vastness of the cosmos, which makes your deepest concerns feel laughably quaint, yet vanishingly rare.
From galaxy, a gravitationally bound system of millions of stars + agog, awestruck. Pronounced “gal-uh-gawg.”
CRAXIS
n. the unease of knowing how quickly your circumstances could change on you—that no matter how carefully you shape your life into what you want it to be, the whole thing could be overturned in an instant, with little more than a single word, a single step, a phone call out of the blue, and by the end of next week you might already be looking back on this morning as if it were a million years ago, a poignant last hurrah of normal life.
Latin crāstinō diē, tomorrow + praxis, the process of turning theory into reality. Pronounced “krak-sis.”
SUERZA
n. a feeling of quiet amazement that you exist at all; a sense of gratitude that you were even born in the first place, that you somehow emerged alive and breathing despite all odds, having won an unbroken streak of reproductive lotteries that stretches all the way back to the beginning of life itself.
Spanish suerte, luck + fuerza, force. Pronounced “soo-wair-zuh.”
MAHPIOHANZIA
n. the frustration of being unable to fly, unable to stretch out your arms and vault into the air, having finally shrugged off the burden of your own weight, which you’ve been carrying your entire life without a second thought.
There’s a felt joy here in discovering new words and fresh possibilities. Perhaps we can say what we thought we could not. And at the heart of all language, we feel the delightful unburdening, the release of sharing with another like us.