Have you ever felt spectator - an irresistible desire to "tear your clothes off while dancing"?
And maybe a little flirt - a fluttery, fluttery feeling while talking to someone you like?
What about uitvaienom - which embodies the revitalizing effects of a walk in the wind?
These words, taken from Bantu, Tagalog, and Dutch, have no direct English equivalent, but they represent a very precise emotional experience overlooked in other languages.
Tim Lomas from the University of East London wants to make them more widely known.
Lomasov Positive Lexicography Project wants to evoke the diverse flavors of good feelings (some of which are decidedly bittersweet) from around the world, in the hope that we might start incorporating them into our everyday lives.
English has already borrowed many emotions from other languages, after all, just think of "frisson" from French or "schadenfreude" from German, but there are many more that have not yet made it into the dictionary.
Lomas has found hundreds of these "untranslatable" experiences, and it can be said that he is only at the beginning.
If we learn these words, he hopes, it would allow us a richer and more subtle understanding of ourselves.
"They offer a very different view of the world."
Lomas says he was first inspired to take this action when he heard a lecture about the Finnish concept. guts, which is a kind of "express determination despite hostility".
According to native Finnish speakers, English notions of "heartiness," "endurance," or "resilience" fall nowhere near describing the inner strength best described by their specific term.
It was "untranslatable" in the sense that there was no direct or easy equivalent woven into the English vocabulary that could convey that profound meaning.
Intrigued, he began hunting for new examples, sifting through academic literature and asking every foreign acquaintance for their own examples.
The first results of this project were published in Journal of Positive Psychology.
Many of the expressions referred to extremely specific positive feelings, often dependent on very specific circumstances:
- To loosen (Portuguese) - to let go of inhibitions while having fun
- Tarab (Arabic) - a state of ecstasy or enchantment caused by music
- Shinrin-someone (Japanese) - relaxation obtained by bathing in the forest, figurative or literal
- Gigil (tagalog) - an irresistible desire to pinch or squeeze someone because they are loved or appreciated
- Juan bei (Chinese) - a feeling of complete and perfect fulfillment
- Ikcuarpok (Inuit) - the anticipation that someone feels while waiting for someone, when they go outside every now and then to see if that someone has arrived
But other words represented more complex and bittersweet experiences, which can be crucial to our development or overall progress:
- Natsukashi (Japanese) - nostalgic longing for the past, with joy over a fond memory, but also sadness because it is no longer there
- Vabi-sabi (Japanese) - "dark, desolate sublimity" focused on the transience and imperfection of beauty
- Saudade (Portuguese) - melancholic longing for a person, place, or thing that is far away either spatially or temporally - a vague, dreamy sadness for a phenomenon that may not even exist
- Zenzuht (German) - "life longing", an intense desire for alternative states or experiences of life, even if they are unattainable.
In addition to these emotions, Lomas' lexicography recorded personal characteristics and behaviors that could determine our well-being and the ways in which we interact with other people in the long term.
- Dadiri (Australian Aboriginal) expression - a deep, spiritual act of reflective and respectful listening
- Relaxing (Hungarian) - literally means "rested brain", and describes people whose brains work quickly and can come up with sophisticated jokes or solutions
- Desenrascanko (Portuguese) - to skillfully extricate oneself from a problematic situation
- Dry (Sanskrit) - sincere, lasting happiness independent of circumstances
- Orenda (Huron language) - the power of the human will to change the world despite powerful forces such as fate
You can see many more examples on his website, where you can also add your own words.
Lomas readily admits that many of the descriptions he has offered so far are only approximations of the true meaning of the terms in question.
"The whole project is a work in progress, and I want to keep refining the definitions of the words on the list," he says.
"I definitely welcome people's feedback on that."
In the future, Lomas hopes that other psychologists may begin to explore the causes and consequences of these experiences, to improve our understanding of the emotions behind the concepts in English that have dominated research so far.
But studying these expressions won't just be of scientific interest; Lomas suspects that getting to know these words better could actually change the way we experience ourselves, drawing our attention to elusive feelings we've long ignored.
"In our stream of consciousness, that rush of different sensations and emotions, there's so much to process that many of them pass us by," says Lomas.
"The feelings we have learned to recognize and label are the ones we notice, but there are many more that we may not be aware of."
"And so I think if we get these new words, they can help us articulate whole areas of experience that we've only been barely noticing."
As evidence, Lomas points to the work of Lisa Feldman Barrett of Northeastern University, who has shown that our abilities to identify and label our emotions can have far-reaching consequences.
Her research was inspired by the observation that some people use different words for emotions interchangeably, while others are extremely precise in their descriptions.
"Some people use words like anxious, scared, angry, disgusted to talk about general affective states of bad mood," she explains.
"For them they are synonyms, while for other people they are distinctive feelings with distinctive actions associated with them."
This is called "emotional granularity," and she typically measures it by asking participants to rate their own feelings every day over a period of several weeks, before calculating the variations and nuances within their own reports: whether the same old expressions always match, for example.
More importantly, she discovered that this then determines how well we do in life.
If you can better determine whether you're feeling despair or anxiety, for example, you might be able to better determine how to heal those feelings: whether to talk to a friend or watch a comedy.
Or the ability to identify hope after disappointment could help you look for new solutions to your problem.
In this way, an emotional vocabulary is a bit like a phone book, allowing you to apply a greater number of strategies for dealing with problems in life.
Indeed, people who score higher on emotional granularity can recover from stress more easily and faster and are less likely to drink alcohol as a way to recover from bad news.
It can even improve your success in school.
Mark Brackett of Yale University found that teaching 10- and 11-year-olds a richer vocabulary improves their end-of-year grades and promotes better classroom behavior.
"The more granular our experience of emotions, the more able we are to discern our own inner lives," he says.
Both Brackett and Barrett agree that Lomas's "positive lexicography" could be a good stimulus for beginning to recognize the more subtle contours of our emotional landscape.
"I think it's really useful - you can remember the words and the concepts they're associated with as tools for life," Barrett says.
They might even inspire us to try new experiences or look at old ones in a new light.
It's a line of research that Lomas would like to explore more in the future.
Meanwhile, Lomas continues to strive to expand the lexicography, which is growing and growing.
Of all the words he's found so far, Lomas says he most often finds himself thinking about Japanese concepts like invite-sabi (that "dark, sometimes sublime" that encompasses transience and imperfection).
"It speaks to the idea of finding beauty in phenomena that are outdated and imperfect," he says.
"If we looked at the world through that prism, it could be a different way of experiencing life."
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