John Koenig starts his 2021 book with a Steven Wright quote (the comedian not the knuckleball pitcher)
The book is divided into six sections, likely how I will study this book is to give an overview of each facet of the human experience underrepresented by our common vocabulary:
- The outer world
- The inner self
- The people you know
- The people you don’t
- The passage of time
- The search for meaning
Koenig notes that these words he’s coined aren’t “necessarily intended to be used in conversation, but to exist for their own sake.”
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Apparently Koenig’s term “sonder” is already gaining some traction. His Dictionary is a bound form of a long running website I somehow entirely didn’t know about. Today I dig into these words with earnest, drawing on my notes from yesterday, in that I’m partaking in the copy pasta method.
I do take issue with Apple Pages refusing to acknowledge that these may be new words. Red squiggles will be the bane of my existence in these obscure linguistic pursuits. It is the perfect example of a first world problem, but a nuisance nonetheless.
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Word 1: “chrysalism”
The first word of the outer world Koenig offers is “chrysalism” as Koenig defines as a noun: “the amniotic tranquility of being indoors during a thunderstorm.
This new word is based on the Latin chrysalis, “the pupa of a butterfly.”
First I must define ‘amniotic’. I think of the state of being in the womb. Technically, it refers to the ‘amnion’: “the innermost membrane that encloses the embryo of a mammal, bird, or reptile,” according to the New Oxford Dictionary. So that’s the essential meaning, being within the womb, itself a concept worth exploring in further detail. Our language seems to be decaying more quickly than I thought…
I haven’t felt this sort of chrysalism since perhaps my teenage years while relaxing in the loft of a now entirely dismantled cabin in Maine. To even think of such a state now brings profound sadness. Now I look upon being indoors during a thunderstorm as more of a state of being not at all tranquil. So this is a state of being with which I no longer relate with properly, a small but significant part of the human experience with which I have cut myself off from.
When we disown others we also disown what was most dear to them, often not quite aware of the damage we inflict upon ourselves.