This week: All words are made-up but some are made-up to go out, you know? Let’s talk about it.
Zielschmerz
Like every good word nerd, I have a whole collection of books that are really little more than collections of words arranged in some kind of list. One one side of the shelf, you've got the helpful books, the ones full of commonly misused or misspelled words, or the ones that lay out the long, tangled histories of everyday phrases and idioms. There in the middle are the books that play with language, the books that compile obscure British insults from the 18th century and the ones that teach us all the non-English words that we should borrow into English followed by the mock dictionaries where each entry is accompanied by a definition that is somehow more accurate than the actual definition. And then, way down on the other end, almost falling off the shelf, are my favorites - the ones that are just completely made-up.
These are books like Douglas Adams and John Lloyd's the Deeper Meaning of Liff where each word is actually a place name substituting in for a word English doesn't have but really ought to. Or books like...well, no. That's it. That's the end of the list. Until just recently anyway.
Earlier this week, after an extended conversation about our creative endeavors and feelings of absolute inadequacy regarding our ability to ever actually achieve our respective ambitions, a friend texted me, "zielschmerz."
n. the exhilarating 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 created in kindergarten and kept sealed as long as you could, only to break in case of emergency.
So, you know, uhm. Yeah. Put the mirror down, I didn't come here to be so seen. But once I got past the feeling of having been personally attacked with my reflection, I started to wonder about the word. Why did it look so familiar and yet so alien at the same time?
Turns out, zielshmerz is a made-up word. Wikipedia has the break-down:
The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows is a website and YouTube channel, created by John Koenig, that coins and defines neologisms for emotions that do not have a descriptive term...The terms are often based on "feelings of existentialism" and are meant to "fill a hole in the language".
Or perhaps just the aching, gaping hole in my soul where my sense of self-worth used to be. Snark aside, I realized I had been aware of the project for years via the word sonder1, or, "the awareness that everyone has a story."
Sonder became one of Koenig's early successes at putting a new word into the zeitgeist; after being coined in 2012, it soon became a cromulent word being used across all manner of media, to the point that at least one company has claimed the word as a name. And, honestly, that's just a good word. It works. When you read the definition (in the book) and see how people have begun to use it, it feels just as cromulent as, well, cromulent.
In researching the Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, I ran a few searches for similar2 books of made-up words and came across two more that look interesting:
Grantasms is a 2019 book of words made-up by the author, Grant Allen Crowell; what began as jokes and word play to make people laugh ended up becoming an art project in and of itself.
The Made-Up Words Project by Rinee Shaw takes a different approach. The author interviewed families for their made-up words, the special words that had meaning only within a given family unit.
One of English's strongest features as a language is its ability and willingness to take on new words without giving thought to necessity or urgency; despite the claims of prescriptivists, there is nothing wrong with making up words. Novelists and poets have been doing it for centuries. But what I like about all three of these projects is that they don't treat the act of coining words nor the words themselves as oddities. There is none of Shakespeare's cheeky creating of a new word just to match a clever rhyme scheme nor the purposeful silliness of Lewis Carrol's neologisms. Instead, there is a clarity to the lists - these are words created by people who felt a need for them.
They needed words to help them connect to others, to express themselves, or to describe something utterly new in the world. And so they made them up. Kentuckey3, indeed.
91 Days:
The 91 Days project has made it through the first month! You can read up on the project, see how it’s going, or join in by following the links below. It’s a lot of fun so far and I’d love to see how other people do with the challenge.
Down the Rabbit Hole:
I’m going to do things a little differently this week and link some of my favorite books that are really just lists of words. I’m going to link to their entries on Amazon, but these are not affiliate links. I’m just using Amazon to get the most recent covers and publication dates to you. Here we go:
From the Archives:
Half a year ago, I wrote an entire essay trying to define just what a dictionary is. Since we spent so much of this week talking about one, I thought I’d refresh our memories. Enjoy!
Koenig takes special pains to give his words "realistic" etymologies. In the case of sonder, it's from the French "to probe" and the German "special."
Both projects stand somewhat at odds with The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows in that they are much lighter in tone.
"Fitting exactly and satisfyingly." - Douglas Adams, The Meaning of Liff.
Ogden Nash. Walt Kelly (Pogo). Both gifted at making up words.
I have one I’ve used for years that I made up, in the style of Nash and Kelly:
Grismal:
Dark, cold, rainy weather. A portmanteau of “grim” and “dismal.”
May it enter the lexicon!
It's a great made up word. :)