The Unique Joy of Learning New Words

    With all that's happening in the news, life can feel like an exercise in determining the particular kind of bad we are experiencing the. Are we anxious or depressed? Lonely, or stressed?

    Tim Lomas, a senior lecturer in positive psychology at the University of East London, is engaged in the opposite endeavor,  all the types of well-being that he can find. Specifically, Lomas is seeking to psychological insight by collecting untranslatable words that describe pleasurable feelings we don't have a  for in English. "It's almost like each one is a window onto a new landscape," Lomas says. So far, with the help of many contributors, he has amassed nearly 1000 in what he calls a "positive lexicography"— including the Dutch pretoogies, which refers to the twinkling eyes of someone engaged in benign mischief; The Arabic tarab, a word for musically induced ecstasy; And the Creole tabanca, which describes the feeling of being left by someone you love.

    People are fascinated with untranslatable words in part because they are useful: How else could we talk to each other about the pleasure of schadenfreude? But Lomas also see them as a means of showing us "new possibilities for ways of living," describing them as invitations for people to experience happy phenomena that may previously have had been "hidden from them" or to revel in feelings they couldn't previously . Consider the Japanese ohanami, a word for gathering with others to appreciate lowers.

Linguists have long argued about how much the language we speak — partly by factors like geography and climate — limits the thoughts we are capable of having or the actions we can take. The words in which different societies live are distinct worlds, not merely the same world with different labels ," wrote the theorist Edward Sapir.

    Perusing (研读) the words in Lomas' collection, at the least, is a means of meditating on ways that we can feel good. When asked for one of his favorites, the psychologist lists the German Fernweh, which describes a  to travel to distant lands, a kind of homesickness for the unexplored. Also delightful is the Danish morgenfrisk, describing the satisfaction one gets from a good night's sleep, and the Latin otium,  the joy of being in control of one's own time.