The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows

by John Koenig

mal de coucou n. a condition in which you have an active social life but very few close friends—people who you can trust, who you can be yourself with, who can help flush out the weird psychological toxins that tend to accumulate over time—which can eventually progress into a state of acute social malnutrition, where even if you devour an entire buffet of chitchat, you’ll still feel pangs of hunger. French mal, ache + de coucou, of the cuckoo bird. Coucou is also a French colloquialism for “Hey there!” Mal de coucou is a riff on the term mal de caribou, also known as rabbit starvation, in which you can starve to death even with unlimited access to lean meats like rabbit and caribou, after eating an excess of protein and not enough fat. Pronounced “mal duh koo-koo.”