- Over the last few years I’ve hunted down words for emotions I didn’t even know I had. I took them home. I tried to describe and categorize them. Along with exasperating everyone I know with endless questions, one of the effects of this process is that I’ve come to appreciate some of the more peculiar connections between the words we use to talk about feelings, and the emotions we actually feel.
It’s a long-held belief among therapists that learning to name our emotions can ultimately make them less volatile and uncomfortable.
But less spoken about is the other side of this coin: that learning new words for emotions can also bring feelings to life. Discover the definition of a new emotion, and you’ll almost certainly find yourself re-organizing your inner world, seeing vague or amorphous sensations as concrete instances of a recognizable category of experience. It wasn’t until I learnt the Japanese word Amae, which roughly translates as “the pleasure of surrendering to another in perfect safety,” that I started to experience this feeling in my own life on a regular basis—and discovered how nervous it made me feel.
Didn't know about Amae but I know the feeling. It has a touch of homefulness mixed with the safety felt during a storm (is there a word for it?) Nakhes though... I have a feeling that the translation or explanation of it is not correct. There is a word we say in Arabic that sounds exactly the same and many people use in a different context (or the use can be explained otherwise). Nakhes is the Arabic use is when you are jinxed or cursed. It can be used as a verb. To nakhes someone is to curse them. Said in the example from the article, it would mean more like "keep the curse away", like knocking on wood... But I have a feeling that this could be one of those words that diverted its meaning from the common ancestral language. Thinking about it, it could be related to the Hebrew Nekhes, which is like property or wealth. Which makes the explanation given by the article work. I will do some research 😁Nakhes: Perhaps your youngest has just crawled for the first time, or your oldest has cooked a quiche. Seeing a child achieve something—anything!—can make the heart feel like it’s about to burst with joy. In Yiddish there’s a special word for this feeling: nakhes (pronounced: na-khez, with the kh pronounced like the ch in loch). It makes parents kvell (crow with delight) over even the littlest achievements of their squirming offspring, binding the generations together in a shared feeling of success
Half of these are phrases not words. still... Mono no aware - me to me Hammock - Mono no aware Mono no aware - Blackbox (for bfv) William Basinski & Lawrence English – Mono No Aware This one in particular feels so universal there ought to be a singular word.