The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows

by John Koenig

idlewild adj. feeling grateful to be stranded in a place where you can’t do much of anything—sitting for hours at an airport gate, the sleeper car of a train, or the backseat of a van on a long road trip—which temporarily alleviates the burden of being able to do anything at any time and frees up your brain to do whatever it wants to do, even if it’s just to flicker your eyes across the passing landscape. From Idlewild, the original name of John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York City.

aubadoir n. the otherworldly atmosphere just before 5 a.m., when the bleary melodrama of an extremely late night becomes awkwardly conflated with the industrious fluorescence of a very early morning. French aubade, an ode to the morning + abattoir, slaughterhouse. Pronounced “oh-bah-dwahr.”

the kick drop n. the moment you wake up from an immersive dream and have to abruptly recalibrate to the real world—unquitting your job, falling right back out of love, reburying your lost loved ones. In American football, the drop kick is when a player drops the ball and kicks it as it bounces off the ground, used as a method of restarting play.

So much of life is spent this way, in ordinary time. There’s no grand struggle, no sacraments, no epiphanies. Just simple domesticity, captured in little images, here and there.

justing n. the habit of telling yourself that just one tweak could solve all of your problems—if only you had the right haircut, if only you found the right group of friends, if only you made a little more money, if only he noticed you, if only she loved you back, if only you could find the time, if only you were confident—which leaves you feeling perpetually on the cusp of a better life, hanging around the top of the slide waiting for one little push. From just, only, simply, merely + jousting, a sport won by positioning the tip of your lance at just the right spot, at just the right second. Pronounced “juhst-ing.”

Maybe there is no single self to speak of. Maybe you’re a shifting collage of many different personas, each as authentic as the next.

etherness n. the wistful feeling of looking around a gathering of loved ones, all too aware that even though the room is filled with warmth and laughter now, it won’t always be this way—that the coming years will steadily break people away into their own families, or see them pass away one by one, until there comes a time when you’ll look back and try to imagine what it felt like to have everyone together in the same place.

One quirk of Roman houses is that all the rooms in the front have Greek names, but all the back rooms are in Latin—as if your outer self and your inner self are speaking in completely different languages.

You see yourself as you are, with your failures just as clear as your successes. But you see most other people on their terms—only from the side they want you to see, like a statue on a high pedestal, stoic and confident.

By conveying an artificial sense of consensus, dictionaries make it all too easy to believe that our words define us, instead of the other way around.