The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows by John Koenig

​If you love words and believe that a language is an ever-evolving thing of beauty, this is a book for you.
English, for all its simplicity, is an insufficient language when it comes to emotional intelligence representation. There are simply too many notions, moods, and obscure sorrows for which there are no words…well, for which they weren’t any words until John Koenig came along and made them up.
Joining the esteemed ranks of Shakespeare, More, Milton, and others, Koenig has been coning the words to describe all the things that used to take paragraphs to describe before for a while now through his website. Eventually, he accumulated enough of them for a dictionary…hence, this dictionary.
Obscure sorrows presuppose a certain melancholy tone and sure enough, there are many ways to be sad and say sad it in this book. Most of them are devastatingly elegant and strikingly clever. These words have a meaning, they have etymology, they don’t just exist, they deserve to exist.
And I really wish more of them stuck to the walls of my memory palace, because I would like to just casually toss them into the world now and then.
But then again, how often do you just sit down and read a dictionary? Not often enough, likely. This is no conventional dictionary – some entries get pages of description. Poetic in a way. Only not as pretentious and wonky as most modern poetry. Just kind of…meditative. Thought of the state of being sort of thing. Either way, it’s a perfectly readable dictionary. And for word lovers out there, it’s an absolute delight of a read. Recommended.