The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows

The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, 2nd Ed.

I was twelve years old and obsessed with words like phantasmagoria when I tumbled into the digital pages of The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows. It’s an archive of homegrown neologisms for the emotions and experiences we don’t have words for, yet. Since then, I’ve added entries of my own.

Ineamul

n. Family who shares not the blood in your veins, but the love that runs through them; people you would lend anything to.

Origin: Romanian. ‘Inimă’ meaning ‘heart’. ‘Neamul’ meaning ‘kinfolk’.

More important than the six boxes of possessions they brought to America, my parents carried where they came from. Together with other Romanian immigrants, they created a tight-knit community, who called themselves the Gașcă. Crammed into a barren apartment, they exchanged encouragement on everything from bizarre American social customs to picking up enough English from Discovery Channel to buy a car.

Though I have no relatives here besides my parents, I have something just as powerful in the family of the Gașcă. It’s why I welcome in the New Year reciting verses from “plugușorul” and why I dance the “hora”, arms linked in cheering circles of my ineamul. It’s why I grew up sharing home-baked “cozonac” and a Romanian-American adolescence with twenty-three siblings. It’s why we gather around late-night campfires to sing about trains that smell like garlic and tell stories of home.

My heritage is also why I grew up hearing about Ceauşescu’s cult of personality and the police brutality my ineamul witnessed in the 1989 revolution. Here in America, I recognize similar veins of corruption and injustice, more insidious forms of those that drove the Romanian uprising. Seeing crises met with inaction has galvanized me to speak out loudly against what these broken systems, from the fossil fuel industry to the prison-industrial complex, try to keep quiet.

Poidepasso

adj. Road-trip tired. The state of exhaustion after a long day of travel that drums into your bones but leaves your heart light with anticipation for what lies outside your window.

Origin: French. ‘Poids’ meaning ‘weight’. Italian. ‘Passo’ meaning ‘step’.

At 6 a.m. on a January Tuesday, five friends and I huddled together penguin-style, ready to trek to the state capital for Environmental Lobby Day. There, representatives met me with glowing enthusiasm or frigid impassivity as I explained environmental racism and campaigned for oil spill prevention. But what I lobbied for most ardently was Washington’s 100% Clean Energy bill; a potentially monumental step towards protecting our future. I stood next to my friend, clad in a costume we stitched together from hundreds of used plastic bags, and listened to the Senate weigh in.

Four months later, Governor Jay Inslee signed the bill into effect. When I sprinted to tell my friends, I found their faces already poidepasso to match mine: elated, fully aware that this was only the beginning, and tired, but never idle.

Titivreji

n. World-tilting wonder. Life is a sun-kissed orange and you just peeled back a window into its inner goodness.

Origin: Romanian. ‘Titirez’ meaning ‘spinning top’. ‘Vrăji’ meaning ‘spells’.

At twelve, I found titivreji while lost in language, scouring synonyms and tracing etymologies. Today, I still find titivreji in language, but my definition of language has expanded.

While working at Value Village, I wanted to help non-English speaking immigrants, so I spent hours learning Spanish from customers. But I also unknowingly honed another, wordless language, by conversing in gestures and deciphering intonation. Through art, I use ink to translate personal truths onto paper. I conjugate verbs in calculus when I’m integrating expressions, in a whirlwind of elegant trig substitution.

These languages, and countless more, carry the dictionaries of human experience. We hold our own entries close, but what fascinates me is the exchange of definitions. Through the ligaments of language, I want to help redefine our collective canon into a just dialogue, open to all its authors.