Emotions You Could Never Name

Often I find myself lacking words to describe the sensations I’m experiencing because there are simply things, or so I thought, that cannot be named.

Sometimes certain music transports me away, almost carrying me out of my body and gently placing me in a state of bliss.

Sometimes I get the almost unstoppable need to squeeze, pinch or even bite a cute creature.

On other occasions, I’m waiting for a person impatiently, checking repetitively the time to see how long until this someone appears.

Well, for the musical high there’s a very special word in Arabic, Tarab. And for the irresistible urge to pinch, Gigil is the word you should use (if you are speaking in Tagalog during one of your trips to the Philippines, of course).

Tim Lomas’s Positive Lexicography Project aims to capture the many flavors of feelings found across the world in the hope that we might start to incorporate them all into our daily lives.

Currently he is still working on extending his dictionary parallel to his research on human emotions and the very diverse ways we learn to feel as a consequence of our context.

‘’The analysis of happiness is very Western-centric—it focuses only on Western cultures and the concepts of happiness that already exist within them, there are lots of different types of happiness—the happiness you feel when you eat chocolate isn’t the same as the happiness you feel when you’re getting married. The differences across cultures are due to the value placed in each of these kinds of happiness.‘’

To me, finding his dictionary was a beautiful way to discover the emotions I never could name, or even maybe, the emotions I never realized I had.