This refers to a certain kind of empathy. This French word describes the feeling of itching irritation or fury (on a small scale) that happens when you're disappointed by something, like getting rejected in love or not winning a prize. To experience this sadness is to be affected by the fleeting nature of specific things (love, experiences, sandwiches), and become wistful or reflective about the fact that everything must end. This phrase describes the particular sadness or sensitivity regarding the passage of time and the transience of life. Here are 18 words for sadness and depression that don't have direct equivalents in English. And it'd be a lot easier to explain your particular experience of sadness if you could say, "Yeah, I'm feeling very lebensmüde, with just a hint of hi fun koi gai." Is it a pipe dream to hope that some of these words find their way into everyday English usage? It's happened before schadenfreude, a German word meaning pleasure evoked from the pain of others, is often used in English nowadays. English isn't stunted when it comes to sad adjectives - you can be devastated, mournful, woebegone, crestfallen, wretched, and rueful - but sometimes, other languages pick up on stuff for which we just don't have the words for. But beyond the untranslatables, world languages have the potential to enrich our emotional vocabulary. "Untranslatable" words in other languages - ones that pick up on very particular feelings or situations that can't really be understood outside their particular culture - are pretty fascinating. But if you step outside English - and Latin - other languages possess words that can strongly evoke the real, lived experience of depression. For centuries, depression and its feelings were referred to as " melancholia," a state of deep wistfulness, misery, and withdrawal (as well as an excellent Lars von Trier film). The reason for this is that the original was created by a culture that had a need to encode the meaning of the word expression in a particular way."Įmotions are a particular area where cultural understanding can help shape the way in which a word is used - and what it's used to described. "When the translation occurs, it is frequently the case that the translation is not exact and some sense of the original is lost. "Often when a word or expression doesn’t have a one-to-one translation into another language, it’s because the original word or expression is culturally bound," says Jennifer Bloomquist, Ph.D., a professor of linguistics at Gettysburg College. Words for sadness that don't translate into English can often be far more true to the experience of that feeling than what's already available in our language. That's pretty evocative - but it doesn't cover a lot of the emotions of depression itself the isolation, the abyss-like fears. The word "depression" in English had its own poetic connotations: the word (from Latin deprime) essentially means being forced downward, or a low, sunken place, according to the Oxford English Dictionary. One of the most frustrating feelings about depression is how hard it is to describe.
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