The Lexicon Obscura

The whispering sound of wind in trees or rustling leaves — the specific acoustic quality of a breeze moving through a canopy, which is distinct from all other wind sounds and recognizable immediately. The nemophilist’s soundtrack. The sound that reaches you before you can see the woods. One of those sensory experiences so common and so particular that its existence without a name seems like a genuine omission, now corrected.

Example

“Before the path turned and the trees came into view, she heard the psithurism — that low, continuous whisper that meant canopy overhead and shade ahead and the particular quality of quiet that only forests produce.”

Origin

From the Greek psithuros (whispering, rustling). A companion to petrichor from Vol. 1 — both are precise names for specific sensory experiences that everyone has had and almost nobody has named. The natural world has been generating both for longer than language has existed.

Rarity ●●●●●

The sound has existed since there were trees. The word has existed since the Greeks. Nobody uses either as often as they should.

The rhetorical device of inserting a word — most commonly an intensifier or expletive — into the middle of another word or phrase. “Abso-blooming-lutely.” “Un-bloody-believable.” “Fan-flipping-tastic.” Every language does this; English does it with particular enthusiasm. The result is emphasis that no other construction quite achieves — a force delivered from the inside of a word rather than attached to the outside of it. The technique is ancient. The name for it is rarely known. Both of these facts are worth correcting.

Example

“The linguist pointed out that ‘abso-blooming-lutely’ was a textbook example of tmesis — the insertion of an expletive into the middle of a word for emphasis, a device English speakers use constantly without knowing it has a name.”

Origin

From the Greek tmesis (cutting), from temnein (to cut). In classical Greek and Latin poetry, tmesis referred to the separation of a compound word by another word inserted between its parts. English has repurposed the device with characteristic informality.

Rarity ●●●●●

You have done this. Probably this week. It has a name. It is fan-lexicon-tastic.

The frustration of being stuck in just one body that inhabits only one place at a time — the awareness that while the world is vast and various and full of moments happening everywhere simultaneously, you are in exactly one of them, and the rest are proceeding without you. Not quite sadness. Not quite restlessness. The specific feeling of a life that is genuinely good and genuinely, irreducibly small compared to everything it cannot be. The counterpart to sonder: where sonder is the awareness of other lives, onism is the awareness that you can only live one of them.

Example

“Looking at the departures board, she felt the onism arrive — every destination a life she wouldn’t live, every flight a version of herself she would never be, the world too large and the body too single.”

Origin

Coined by John Koenig in The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, from the Greek monos (single, alone). A companion to sonder from Vol. 1 — together they describe the two directions of the same awareness: outward toward other lives, and inward toward the limitations of your own.

Rarity ●●●●●

The feeling that every departures board, every atlas, and every open window produces. Now named.

Winding, bending, full of twists and turns — used of paths, coastlines, arguments, bureaucratic processes, and any other thing that reaches its destination by the most circuitous route available. The anfractuous road through the mountains. The anfractuous explanation that takes twelve minutes to arrive at the point. The anfractuous career path that somehow ended up exactly where it was supposed to. The word sounds like what it describes: there is something winding in its syllables that mirrors the thing it names.

Example

“The path down to the cove was anfractuous in the best possible way — each turn revealing something new, the sea appearing and disappearing between the rocks, the destination never quite in sight until it suddenly was.”

Origin

From the Latin anfractus (a winding, a bending), from am- (around) and fractus (broken, bent). The same fractus root as fracture and fraction — a breaking that, in this case, produces a curve rather than a separation.

Rarity ●●●●●

Applicable to roads, arguments, careers, and most bureaucratic procedures. A versatile and underused word.

A look shared between two people, each wishing the other would initiate something they both desire but neither wants to be first to suggest. The glance across the table when both people are thinking the same thing. The pause before the question that both parties are waiting for. The mutual awareness of a shared wish, held in tension, transmitted through eye contact, never spoken. A single word for something that requires an entire paragraph in English. The Yaghan people of Tierra del Fuego produced this word. The Guinness World Records once listed it as the most difficult word to translate.

Example

“They sat across from each other for a long moment in the pure mamihlapinatapai of it — both knowing, both waiting, neither willing to be the first to say what both of them were thinking.”

Origin

From the Yaghan language of Tierra del Fuego, spoken by the indigenous people of the southernmost tip of South America. The Yaghan language is critically endangered; its last known fully fluent native speaker died in 2022. This word is one of its gifts to the rest of the world, and it deserves to be used.

Rarity ●●●●●

From a language with one remaining speaker. Use this word as often as you can. It matters that it survives.