Review by Booklist Review
Words have the power to transform and make us see the world through a different lens. YouTube host Koenig connects the seemingly unconnectable feelings we as humans experience on a daily basis and puts words to them. Through this practice he has created his own language to define each word along with the etymology that inspired it. Broken into separate chapters that focus on varying themes, each section of Koenig's dictionary contains a brief introduction followed by words and their accompanied definition. Readers will delight in words like funkenzwangsvorstellung which is defined by Koenig as "the primal trance of watching a campfire in the dark." Coming across definitions for words like candling (assessing your life on your birthday), rivener ("a chilling hint of distance that creeps slowly into a relationship"), and elosy (fear of inevitable changes), among many other expressions readers may have not heard before offer a tiny slice of our shared humanity. Koenig brilliantly finds a way to show, in his new words and their definitions, how we connect to ourselves and one another through feelings and emotions.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Koenig (Charismata) brings his website of the same name to the page in this whimsical speculative dictionary of "new words for emotions." His definitions are broken into six sections: "Between living and dreaming" introduces the word for the longing to quit one's job for a "simple life" (trumspringa) and for being proud of a scar (scabulous), while "The interior wilderness" covers the desire to care less and relax (liberosis). In "Montage of attractions," fensiveness is "a knee-jerk territorial reaction when a friend displays a casual interest in one of your obsessions," and "Faces in a crowd" covers hailbound, the compulsion to wave to strangers. In "Boats against the current," zenosyne is "the feeling that time is getting faster," while in "Roll the bones," elosy is the fear of big life changes. While most are straightforward definitions, some are "featured" and come in the form of essays on the feeling the term is meant to evoke. Unfortunately, Koenig sometimes slips into platitudes (in his entry for alazia, the fear that one can't change, he writes that "even if it's true that you're no longer flexible enough to be anybody, you might be getting strong enough to finally be yourself"). Still, fans of the site will find this appropriately diverting. Agent: Heather Karpas, ICM Partners. (Nov.)
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Despite its title, Koenig's first book is not about sadness, nor is it mostly about faulty or funny feelings, like Eden Sher's The Emotionary: A Dictionary of Words That Don't Exist for Feelings That Do. Rather, focused on longing, awareness, and evanescence, it enshrines Koenig's well-regarded blog (of the same title) of invented, repurposed, or obsolescent but redefined words forming a glossary of emotions. Expanding "the palette of language," Koenig finely dissects and names "even the faintest quirks of the human condition." Six chapters provide minimal category structures, with themes including the outer world, the inner world, others, friends, time, and meaning. Koenig offers pronunciation help and wide-ranging, semi-serious etymologies. Some coinages will produce a fond smile (plata rasa: that lulling dishwasher sound); others, wistful or anxious recognition (slipfast: the longing to slide through unnoticed). Entries are usually brief, but some expand into reflective mini-essays (morii: the wish to capture the ephemeral). A couple might elicit a wince, but most are agile, erudite, poetic, clever, even witty (aubadoir: that predawn feeling). VERDICT For philosophers, language lovers, novelists, and fantasists, this perspective-expanding little book offers abundant ambedo ("a momentary trance of emotional clarity").--Patricia D. Lothrop
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
