Language is the chalice we lift to our lips to taste our own experience — a vessel that constrains what it contains by giving it its own shape. The more complex our experience, the more muddled the emotions that comprise it, the more it spills outside what language can hold. And yet we live in language — narrative is the neurocognitive pillar of personhood and emotions are how the brain interprets bodily sensations, an interpretation achieved largely by naming. We also live in culture — encoded in each language are a culture’s parameters of what it is permissible to feel, which we internalize as the parameters of what it is possible to feel.

It helps, then, to have a larger lexicon of emotion — larger than our given language, in order to take back the expansiveness of our experience by liberating it from the constraints of culture.

That is what cultural historian Tiffany Watt Smith offers in The Book of Human Emotions: An Encyclopedia of Feeling from Anger to Wanderlust (public library) — a linguistic ledger of feeling exploring the cultural histories and psychosocial nuances behind the words we use to name our most confounding, complex, yet common experiences, partway between The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows (that lovely lexicon of invented words for real things we feel but cannot name based on real etymologies from around the world) and David Whyte’s Consolations (that passionate unfastening of everyday words to reveal the deeper strata of their emotional nuances).

Punctuating the entries in English, from anger to loneliness to delight, are some wonderfully untranslatable words from around the world for very specific affective states and emotional reactions with no equivalent in English — partly because our culture holds no space for them, partly because our model of human nature factors out the reality and dignity of those experiences, partly simply because the English language is not pliant enough to mold itself around such irregularly shaped objects of feeling.

Here are ten of my favorites:

ABHIMAN
Sanskrit

The literal meaning of abhi-man is “self-pride.” Abhiman evokes the pain and anger caused when someone we love, or expect kind treatment from, hurts us. Sorrow and shock are at its root, but it quickly flourishes into a fierce, bruised pride. To recognize abhiman as an inevitable part of our emotional life is to know that breaking the unspoken contracts of love and respect between families and allies is an extremely serious betrayal.

ACEDIA
Greek

A distracting, creeping feeling. Like the tickle of a gnat crawling up your arm. A short-lived but disastrous emotional crisis, usually striking between 11AM and 4PM. Its first signs are listlessness and irritability, but it doesn’t take long to turn into desolation and despair.

AMAE
Japanese

The sensation of temporary surrender in perfect safety when you crumple into the arms of a loved one to be coddled and comforted. In Japan, amae is commonly acknowledged as part of all kinds of relationships, felt not only between family members, but with friends and in the workplace too. According to the Japanese psychologist Takeo Doi, amae is “an emotion that takes the other person’s love for granted,” there when we depend on another’s help with no obligation to be grateful in return. You can even be encouraged to show amae to yourself. For Doi, surrendering to amae is important because it represents a return to the indulgences and unconditional nurturing of infancy. It’s the glue which allows stable relationships to flourish, an emblem of the deepest trust… this combination of vulnerability and belonging.

BASOREXIA
20th-century English derivative of Latin and Greek

The sudden urge to kiss someone.

GRENG JAI
Thai

The feeling of being reluctant to accept another’s offer to help because of the bother it would cause them.

KAUKOKAIPUU
Finnish

Feeling homesick for a place you’ve never been to. From kauko — faraway, and kaipuu — a yearning.

MALU
Indonesian

The sudden experience of feeling constricted, inferior and awkward around people of higher status.

SAUDADE
Portuguese

A melancholic yearning for someone, or something, which is far away or lost. It’s always there, pulsing between the surface with its hopefulness tinged with grief. There is a vague yearning, yet it is interlaid with resignation and the pleasure of remembering past joys.

VIRAHA
Sanskrit

Viraha is usually translated as longing or the particular kind of love felt during separation or abandonment. An aspect of sringara rasa (erotic and romantic love), one of the nine rasas or themes that shape human experience, viraha is a feeling of incompleteness without a loved one, and a fixation on the ecstasy of the longed-for reunion. Viraha recalls the formulations of romantic infatuation, not only the erotic — the poetry of the Occitan troubadours, or the inconsolable longing expressed in Portuguese fado music. The difference is that viraha is also a religious feeling — the soul’s quest to find it’s spiritual home. [See John Donne’s “Batter My Heart”.]

ŻAL
Polish

Żal (pronounced jal is melancholy felt at an irretrievable loss. This is not straightforward dejection. Żal is fickle, and shifts its shape, one moment resigned, the next rebellious. It combines the disappointment, regret and even violent fury which comes when some part of our lives has been taken away for good. It is most of all a kind of anger at recognizing the end of things.

Couple with Pablo Neruda’s love letter to language, then revisit artist Julie Paschkis’s illustrated ode to words and the meanings between them.