Reviews
A book that treats emotions in such detail! I kept nodding along as I read. It’s like a friend who understands what’s in my heart.
The content is good, but I don’t think the translation is very smooth. There were parts I had to read more than ten times to figure out what they meant. Phrases like ‘you are your own...’ and ‘you yourself...’ come up often and get tiring, but overall the book’s content is good.
Though it’s called a dictionary, every word is rooted in human emotion, so the book feels like a dictionary, an essay, and a poem all at once. Each word makes me think of a time I felt that emotion. If you feel there’s not enough time in modern life to look inward, I recommend slowing down and savoring this book as you examine your feelings in detail.
One-line review: Exploring a world of emotions with naming as a compass. My first impression of Naming the Sorrows was ‘striking.’ The vivid blue, like a wave of paint, caught my eye. My second impression was ‘intriguing.’ I wanted to know what the alien-looking words on the cover meant. Opening the book, I learned that all the words in it are neologisms. It was fascinating that word-making begun by one person could bring so many people joy. Then I realized that it makes sense: discovering that
I can’t help calling this an absolute must-read. The author creates their own neologisms. They feel like words born of early-morning sentiment, yet they also make sharp, logical points. While reading, I looked up the author’s YouTube, though I couldn’t understand what they were saying in English. The comments translated right away, and the commenters were all poets and writers, too. I had no idea a channel like this existed. I keep looking up unfamiliar Western history and people mentioned in
Naming the Sorrows — John Koenig (author), Hwang Yu-won (translator), Willbook, May 18, 2024. I fell in love at first sight with the very first word. 🔖 Chrysalism, noun: the womb-like tranquility of being indoors during a thunderstorm. The moment I saw this word, I thought of a feeling I believe I’ve mentioned in reviews before. I often get that feeling when reading Haruki Murakami or Banana Yoshimoto. I wondered whether other people had felt it, too—perhaps as many as this author had. The
As a novelist, one of my biggest challenges is choosing the right words for a character’s feelings or state of mind. It’s frustrating when only a few trite words come to mind, and that happens often when I’m busy and living much the same routine day after day. Maybe that’s why I knew I had to read this book as soon as I saw the cover. I was surprised from the beginning to learn that the author had spent 12 years creating new words for all kinds of feelings. The book covers many emotions, not
Everyone is sometimes swept up in feelings that defy description—ambiguous emotions that ordinary words can’t express. The author put into practice the desire to fill the gaps in our imperfect language. The project Naming the Sorrows gives names to feelings shared by all humanity but not yet named. It gathered and coined specific words for ‘sorrow’ to create a dictionary of neologisms. The author’s dedication over 12 years is impressive. All the words in the book are newly coined, and it even
Do you know the origin of ‘OK’? One story traces it to ‘orl korrect’ (‘all correct’), but there’s no solid evidence. And its meaning doesn’t seem that important. On its own it may mean nothing, yet in context and interaction it can take on meaning and move us. This is a fascinating book built on an unusual idea. For 12 years, the author ran an ‘emotional neologism’ project on a personal blog and then YouTube, turning feelings we’ve all experienced into new words and collecting them in this
There are things without names: things plainly present, but for which we have no proper word, so we begin to speak and then look away; things whose boundaries cannot be traced; things we know but cannot say we know or admit we share. Feelings can be like that, too. Some sorrows go unnamed because we can’t bring ourselves to put them into words. Some are so subtle that we pass them by without recognizing them as sorrow. Others sit wedged among other feelings like unwanted baggage, pushed into a
John Kennick: Giving a Name to Sadness
‘Sonder,’ ‘kenopsia,’ ‘déjà vu’... These words have circulated quietly for years. They aren’t official dictionary entries or trendy slang, yet people who discover them often say they can’t imagine how they managed without these piercing words. The Naming the Sorrows project gives names to subtle feelings that clearly exist within us, even when they’re hard to define. Naming the Sorrows, a dictionary-form collection of the emotional neologisms gathered over more than a decade through the project, is now available as a book. It contains more than 300 carefully named, nuanced feelings, including sonder, the realization that you may be an extra in someone else’s life, and kenopsia, the atmosphere of a once-bustling place that has fallen quiet. Turning each page of this list of new words, created with deep linguistic knowledge and sensitivity, is an astonishing, poetic experience. It could also be called a collection of poems about feelings we’ve all experienced, knowingly or not. Recommended by poet Kim So-yeon as ‘a book to keep within reach for the rest of your life’ and praised by critic Shin Hyeong-cheol as ‘a quiet comfort for others’ pain and an intelligent language remedy for one’s own sorrow,’ the book began as a personal blog called Naming the Sorrows. It grew into the YouTube project Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, praised by leading media outlets and famous figures such as novelist John Green and Beyoncé. The book appeared 12 years after the project began.
Korean title: 슬픔에 이름 붙이기
Korean author: 존 케닉
Korean publisher: 윌북
ISBN-13: 9791155817193
Reviews
A book that treats emotions in such detail! I kept nodding along as I read. It’s like a friend who understands what’s in my heart.
The content is good, but I don’t think the translation is very smooth. There were parts I had to read more than ten times to figure out what they meant. Phrases like ‘you are your own...’ and ‘you yourself...’ come up often and get tiring, but overall the book’s content is good.
Though it’s called a dictionary, every word is rooted in human emotion, so the book feels like a dictionary, an essay, and a poem all at once. Each word makes me think of a time I felt that emotion. If you feel there’s not enough time in modern life to look inward, I recommend slowing down and savoring this book as you examine your feelings in detail.
One-line review: Exploring a world of emotions with naming as a compass. My first impression of Naming the Sorrows was ‘striking.’ The vivid blue, like a wave of paint, caught my eye. My second impression was ‘intriguing.’ I wanted to know what the alien-looking words on the cover meant. Opening the book, I learned that all the words in it are neologisms. It was fascinating that word-making begun by one person could bring so many people joy. Then I realized that it makes sense: discovering that
I can’t help calling this an absolute must-read. The author creates their own neologisms. They feel like words born of early-morning sentiment, yet they also make sharp, logical points. While reading, I looked up the author’s YouTube, though I couldn’t understand what they were saying in English. The comments translated right away, and the commenters were all poets and writers, too. I had no idea a channel like this existed. I keep looking up unfamiliar Western history and people mentioned in
Naming the Sorrows — John Koenig (author), Hwang Yu-won (translator), Willbook, May 18, 2024. I fell in love at first sight with the very first word. 🔖 Chrysalism, noun: the womb-like tranquility of being indoors during a thunderstorm. The moment I saw this word, I thought of a feeling I believe I’ve mentioned in reviews before. I often get that feeling when reading Haruki Murakami or Banana Yoshimoto. I wondered whether other people had felt it, too—perhaps as many as this author had. The
As a novelist, one of my biggest challenges is choosing the right words for a character’s feelings or state of mind. It’s frustrating when only a few trite words come to mind, and that happens often when I’m busy and living much the same routine day after day. Maybe that’s why I knew I had to read this book as soon as I saw the cover. I was surprised from the beginning to learn that the author had spent 12 years creating new words for all kinds of feelings. The book covers many emotions, not
Everyone is sometimes swept up in feelings that defy description—ambiguous emotions that ordinary words can’t express. The author put into practice the desire to fill the gaps in our imperfect language. The project Naming the Sorrows gives names to feelings shared by all humanity but not yet named. It gathered and coined specific words for ‘sorrow’ to create a dictionary of neologisms. The author’s dedication over 12 years is impressive. All the words in the book are newly coined, and it even
Do you know the origin of ‘OK’? One story traces it to ‘orl korrect’ (‘all correct’), but there’s no solid evidence. And its meaning doesn’t seem that important. On its own it may mean nothing, yet in context and interaction it can take on meaning and move us. This is a fascinating book built on an unusual idea. For 12 years, the author ran an ‘emotional neologism’ project on a personal blog and then YouTube, turning feelings we’ve all experienced into new words and collecting them in this
There are things without names: things plainly present, but for which we have no proper word, so we begin to speak and then look away; things whose boundaries cannot be traced; things we know but cannot say we know or admit we share. Feelings can be like that, too. Some sorrows go unnamed because we can’t bring ourselves to put them into words. Some are so subtle that we pass them by without recognizing them as sorrow. Others sit wedged among other feelings like unwanted baggage, pushed into a
