Words

• Abiogenesis - the original evolution of life or living organisms from inorganic or inanimate substances.

• Amateur - (French): One who loves. A person who engages in pursuit for pleasure and not just as a job.

• Anathema - someone or something that is hated or avoided. Also refers to formal excommunication by a church, pertaining to a person or thing condemned by God.

• Anemoia - nostalgia for a time or place one has never known.

• Anfractuous - roundabout or winding.

• Anthropopathy - ascription of human passions or feelings to a being not human, especially to a deity.

• Apathy - An absence of passion. A lack of feeling, emotion, interest, or concern about something. A state of indifference about emotional, social, spiritual, philosophical, virtual or physical life.

• Apanthropy - aversion to human company, love or solitude.

• Apoptosis - programmed cell death.

• Auteur - an artist with a very distinct, recognizable approach.

• Ægir - the Norse personification of the Sea.

• Blitzkrieg - lighting warfare. Pertaining to rapid attack.

• Casus Belli - an act or event that provokes or is used to justify declaring war

• Cepheid - any of a class of variable stars whose very regular light variations are related directly to their intrinsic luminosities and whose apparent luminosities are used to estimate distances in astronomy

• Corvid - any of a family of stout-billed passerine birds which include crows, jays, ravens, and the raven.

• Dammerung - (German) Dawn / Twilight.

• Despair - the complete loss or absence of hope.

• Eigen - (German) own, peculiar or private to someone. Idiosyncratic, Proper, or Proprietary

• Emergence - a phenomenon where a complex entity has properties or behaviors that its parts do not have on their own and emerge only when they interact in a whole.

• Ennui - a feeling of listlessness and dissatisfaction arising from a lack of occupation or excitement.

• Entropy - a measure of randomness or disorder within a system.

• Finifugality - to hate endings

• Fractal - a never ending pattern.

• Gestalt - an organized whole that is perceived as more than the sum of its parts.

• Gesellschaft - (German) social relations based on impersonal ties (i.e., duty to society).

• Gesundheit - (German) good health, said in response to sneezing (akin to Bless You)

• Gnosis - knowledge of spiritual matters; mystical knowledge

• Haan - (Korean) said to be an essential element of Korean Identity. An internalized feeling of resentful Sorrow brought about by the feeling of having been wronged or oppressed.

• Habsuchtig - (German) literally translates to the sickness (passion) for having. In other words, greed.

• Kafkaesque - having a nightmarishly complex, bizarre, or illogical quality. Marked by surreal distortion and a sense of looming danger.

• Lament - a passionate expression of grief or sorrow, often in music, poetry, or song form. The grief is born of regret or mourning.

• Legerdemain - sleight of hand. Trickery.

• Manumission - the liberation from slavery, bondage, or restraint.

• Monomania - a form of partial insanity conceived as single psychological obsession in an otherwise sound mind

• Nefelibata - (Portuguese) lit. Cloud Walker. One who lives in the clouds of their own imagination or dreams, or who does not obey the conventions of society, literature or art.

• Nihilism - the belief that life is without intrinsic value, meaning, or purpose. In general, pertains to rejecting conventional philosophical views (i.e., that there are no ethics, no reality, no knowledge, no significance).

• Petrichor - the earthly scent produced when rain falls on dry soil.

• Pofuchenzhou - (Chinese) (lit.) to break the cauldrons and sink the boats. To cut off one’s means of escape in order to fight to the bitter end

• Quixotic - foolishly impractical, especially in the pursuit of ideals, especially marked by rash lofty romantic ideas or extravagantly chivalrous action.

• Sanguine - a blood red color. In medieval times, it was an indicator that a person was optimistic due to the predominance of blood.

• Schadenfreude - (German) The experience of pleasure, joy or self-satisfaction that comes from learning or of witnessing the troubles, failures or humiliation of another.

• Schwellenangst - (German) - a fear of crossing a threshold. The fear of embarking on something new.

• Sonder - the realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own, and that each life continues invisibly around you.

• Syzygy - (Greek) Conjunction; Yoked Together. In astronomy, pertains to three celestial bodies aligning. In philosophy, interpreted as a union of opposites.

• Toska - (Russian) Roughly translates to “Misery”. At its deepest and most painful, it is a sensation of great spiritual anguish, often without any specific cause. At less morbid levels it is a dull ache of the soul, a longing with nothing to long for, a sick pining, a vague restlessness, mental throes, yearning. In particular cases it may be the desire for somebody of something specific, nostalgia, love-sickness. At the lowest level it grades into ennui, boredom.

• Typology - a classification according to a general type.

• Ubermensch - (German) Overman. The goal that humanity should set for itself. The transvaluation of values from the traditional religious “other-worldly” values to more practical values derived from a love of the world and life experience.

• Unheimlich - (German) Uncanny. A feeling that something is not only mysterious but also frightening in a way that feels familiar.

• Verdriet - (Dutch) Sorrow. immense pain or grief.

• Weltschmerz - (German) Lit. World pain. The feeling experienced by an individual who believes that reality can never satisfy the expectations of the mind, resulting in a mood of weariness or sadness about life arising from the acute awareness of evil and suffering.

• Zeitgeist - “The Spirit of the Times”. An invisible agent dominating the characteristics of a given epoch in world history.

Links §

• The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows by John Koenig