The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows

While our two-dimensional lives often encroach on the fullness of our three-dimensional real lives, they can also enhance them. And sometimes they even offer us the most serendipitous gifts of unexpected knowledge or experience.

The internet is like many things in that its power and its value is in how you use it. And so is its danger. Like religion or books or relationships or wine. Your servant can always become your master. And for many of the world’s zealots and bigots it is their holy books that embolden them.

Sure, we spend too much time watching deceptively easily recipe videos or waterboarding ourselves in the comments section of political articles. But if we treat the internet like the virtual library that it is, with the same research mentality we used to treat the card catalog, we can utilize this digital resource in ways either brief or deep. That is to say, dig deep in your search but minimize the time you spend distracting yourself with enumerated lists on buzzfeed or reading entry after entry on McMansion Hell.

Imagine if every research library had a magazine section in the entryway. And all it had were the celebrity gossip rags. Now imagine that the hallway between the lobby and into the actual library is lined with magazines like Forbes, Popular Mechanics, Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s Bazaar, Vanity Fair, The New Yorker and Time.

This is basically what the internet is like. Sometimes you have to machete through a lot of invasive overgrowth to climb the trees, to experience anything solid.  But once in a blue moon, you stumble upon a cleared path. You can find an insightful article or an extraordinary photograph right in the middle of Kardashian news.

So with that meandering caveat of distilled nuance out of the way, this is exactly what happened to me yesterday. A cleared path opened up in front of me. And it branched off of another unexpected path.

Pandora had recently dropped another rainbow in my lap, an group who goes by the name Sonder. Their music made me soar a little bit. I liked each song better than the last.

Yesterday I remembered that I can also just play my new favorites on youtube. But I forgot to specify videos in my search and instead I came upon the most whimsically named website, The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows. It is a collection of invented words and Sonder was defined as follows:

sonder
n. the realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own—populated with their own ambitions, friends, routines, worries and inherited craziness—an epic story that continues invisibly around you like an anthill sprawling deep underground, with elaborate passageways to thousands of other lives that you’ll never know existed, in which you might appear only once, as an extra sipping coffee in the background, as a blur of traffic passing on the highway, as a lighted window at dusk.

So today I add an unassuming secret garden for word nerds to the panopticum of my unexpected favorites.

The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows is a straightforward enough website. But Narnia is most certainly on the other side of this ordinary wardrobe. The magic of this fairytale forest exists somewhere between etymology and neologism. All words were originally invented by someone, neologisms in their own right, until they’re formally or informally adopted into our lexicon.

Creator John Koenig has shared the gift of his imaginative linguistics with a world in dire need of emotive language. For the privileged logophiles who have time for existential crises, and for those who loathe the modern slush pile of words dumbing down our modern lexicon like totes and obvs, Koenig’s craftsmanship couldn’t be more timely. His words are as precise as they are lovely.

This gentleman straight-up invents words to label those nameless watercolor human sensations and experiences we can’t yet quantify. His words have a way of naming things with nostalgia and nuance. Nomenclature has an ugly imperialist history but in this case an oppressor is not relabeling what is already named. He’s giving people who didn’t know they had shared experiences new words to describe them with beauty and efficiency.

And reading some of them is a distinctively connecting experience with faceless strangers.

As C.S. Lewis said about friendship, “You too? I thought I was the only one.”