How are you feeling today? Happy? Sad? Or more likely, is your emotional state a little more complex than that, without a handy word to accurately describe it? The sort of mood that you can only really address by getting a watercolor tattoo or learning how to paint; what do you call that?
John Koenig's Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows is a site dedicated to inventing new words that describe those complex emotions that the English language fails to accurately summarise.
The strange wistfulness of second-hand book shops? That's vellichor. A moment that seemed innocuous at the time but ended up marking a diversion into a strange new era of your life? A keyframe.
Koenig's site has hundreds of these wonderful little invented and borrowed words, each of them neatly encapsulating an emotional state that no-one's previously thought to name, and now the guys at Live Learn Evolve have collated 11 of them and turned them into beautiful designs.
So if you've ever experienced the sadness that you'll never truly know what people think about you, or a melancholic trance in which you become absorbed in vivid sensory details, or if you've over-analysed a momentary state of happiness to the extent that you reduce it to a mere aftertaste, then these designs will help you put a name to your emotional state.
You can find the entire set of designs here.
