Overwhelmed by ambedo? Laid low by catoptic tristesse? These designs will help you put names to those emotions that you can't quite describe.
"Sorry, I can't come in today. Bad case of monachopsis."
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.
Discover useful names for feelings you couldn't quite describe before
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.
You can find hundreds more of these over at John Koenig's site
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 that's what vuvuzelas are good for
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.
Jim McCauley is a writer, performer and cat-wrangler who started writing professionally way back in 1995 on PC Format magazine, and has been covering technology-related subjects ever since, whether it's hardware, software or videogames. A chance call in 2005 led to Jim taking charge of Computer Arts' website and developing an interest in the world of graphic design, and eventually led to a move over to the freshly-launched Creative Bloq in 2012. Jim now works as a freelance writer for sites including Creative Bloq, T3 and PetsRadar, specialising in design, technology, wellness and cats, while doing the occasional pantomime and street performance in Bath and designing posters for a local drama group on the side.
