Fear, isolation, anxiety: complex and universal emotions in The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows

Abstract

The paper explores the recently published Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows (Koenig 2021) as a corpus of neologisms coined to express different emotions that are usually (and universally) experienced but not easily expressed by words. Created from different languages in contact, the newly-coined words will be used to further explore theoretical frameworks on linguistic creativity and the concept of the dictionary as the definitions of the words are given in English. The aim of the paper is to focus on the words proposed to express different emotions related to specific kinds of fear, isolation and anxiety. In relation to the words' manifestation in letter or sound, the paper will also address mentalese (Pinker 1994) as a framework and a concept proposing that lexicons need to co-operate in this unique kind of a dictionary that does not call for an active usage of the words coined but rather presents a dictionary that is a container of new emotions. / Keywords: mentalese, new emotions, languages in contact, multilingual dictionary, contemporary English