by Sheersho Zaman
There comes a time in life when you realize that everyone one around you, every single person in existence, is leading a life as complicated and diverse as your own. That they have their own little stories to tell their friends, their own defining moments that made them who they are, their own loved ones and so on and so forth. Did you know that there was a word, a single word, to describe this phenomenon? Well there is, and it’s called “sonder.” It is a rather obscure word, in that even the inbuilt dictionary of computers does not recognize it. How exactly do people know about it then? The answer is, through the brilliant website and Youtube channel “The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows.”
John Koeing is the person responsible for creating this wonderful website and Youtube channel. Both the site and Youtube channel defines uncommon words or terms that may be in the process of entering common use. For example, when the website defines the word sonder as, “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.”
There are plenty of other wonderful words like this, such as “lachesism,” which the site defines as, “The desire to be struck by disaster—to survive a plane crash, to lose everything in a fire, to plunge over a waterfall—which would put a kink in the smooth arc of your life, and forge it into something hardened and flexible and sharp, not just a stiff prefabricated beam that barely covers the gap between one end of your life and the other.”
Many words that were brought to attention by the dictionary have received a lot of attention and have been lauded for their charm. A lot of these words are also accompanied by a video and these garner even greater responses for their creativity.
All in all, this is a wonderful idea that came to fruition. Words are powerful things and this website highlights some rather wonderful ones. These words do not get the attention they deserve. So if you’re a word-nerd or just interested in learning the names for some extraordinary and charming circumstances, go check them out!