What’s your favorite term of venery? We enjoy of a shrewdness of apes, though a kindle of kittens is always nice to have around the house.
I never get tired of these. A drift of hogs! An exaltation of larks!
“Jabberwocky” from Through the Looking-Glass by Lewis Carroll (1871), trans. to French by Frank L. Warrin (1931) and German by Robert Scott (1872), printed in Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas Hofstadter (1979). More translations & other languages here.
The ultimate translation challenge.
Merry’s ancestry includes the word murgijaz, a Proto-Germanic word meaning ‘short-lasting,’ and the Proto-Indo-European root mreghu- which simply meant ‘short.’ It is suggested that the connection to pleasure comes from the notion of ‘making time fly’ — that time feels short in a pleasurable state. So within merry, the ideas of enjoyment and evanescence find themselves inextricably linked. To wish someone a ‘Merry Christmas,’ in the very old sense, is to wish them pleasure and to express a hope that they’ll savor that pleasure acutely before it passes.
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| — | From the always wonderful Aesthetics of Joy. A belated Merry Christmas, a premature Happy New Year, and a general Delightful Holidays to you all! |
kenopsia
n. the eerie, forlorn atmosphere of a place that’s usually bustling with people but is now abandoned and quiet—a school hallway in the evening, an unlit office on a weekend, vacant fairgrounds—an emotional afterimage that makes it seem not just empty but hyper-empty, with a total population in the negative, who are so conspicuously absent they glow like neon signs.
I have grown very fond of the Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows. Technically this may not be a real word…but language is constantly evolving, right? Let’s evolve this sucker into the vernacular.
