The Dictionary of Obscure Embarrassments

By Siona Kirschner

I recently came across The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, a book that invents cool words for previously difficult-to-describe emotions. I was immediately overcome by fominobia, my own word for the deep devastation when someone else has an idea that you wish had been yours (don’t try to look for the linguistic roots on this one, I just thought it sounded cool and will in fact now be using it in my everyday speech). Anyway, I was in a deep state of fominobic grief when I realized that I didn’t need to be the one to come up with it, I could just rip it off (as long as my version passes as a parody, so please laugh for the sake of legal reasons). 

1. Aggrabellia: When you get angry/indignant about something, but then realize that everyone else thinks it’s no big deal and no one understands your rant so you have to backtrack and act like it’s fine (it isn’t fine at all).

2. Sominoria: When you forget to connect your headphones and your phone starts blasting your music to everyone on the bus/in the coffee shop/at the library, and even worse yet it’s your most questionable playlist. So maybe you have to pretend like you don’t realize and switch to a cool song before connecting your headphones. So the strangers in the library know you’re chill. Potentially. 

3. Superunomsina: That awkward moment when you realize that maybe you’re coming up with better words than are in the original Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows? So, like, possibly/perchance they could just, like, give it to you or something? (This is a silly joke! I would never actually even want that at all. It’s probably really stressful and exhausting and stuff, I’m sure. But not to say I couldn’t handle it, because I would thrive, in this theoretical hypothetical.)

4. Ragefuryterrorarin: When you see a squirrel after reading Sunrise on The Reeping.

5. Annoyarin: When you see a squirrel before reading Sunrise on The Reeping.

6. Gidinadiya: When you realize that someone is doing the thing you started better than you and maybe you need to pass your thing along to them. Like, for instance, if you write a cool little dictionary, and the idea was good, but then this girl makes a really cool parody version. Or a bunch of other examples, that’s just a random one I threw in here casually.

7. Qualiquonia: When someone else has cooler stickers on their computer than you do, so you have to decide how to compliment them while asserting yourself as an equal.

8. Froidanshino: When your smoothie is so cold it brings back your childhood asthma, so you have to pretend you got something caught in your throat to excuse why you’re coughing like a sickly medieval child (no one is convinced).