Eisce

Cover image for the Eisce word card on the Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows

Eisce

n.
the awareness of the infinitesimal role you play in shaping your own society—knowing that whenever you smile at a stranger, pronounce a word a certain way, laugh at a certain joke, or choose the slightly shinier apple, you are unwittingly helping to construct the world in which you live—a role both vanishingly small but also somehow daunting, making it that much harder to complain about the traffic, knowing that you are traffic.

Irish eisceacht, exception. Pronounced “ahy-shuh.”

Monachopsis

Cover image for the Monachopsis word card on the Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows

Plata Rasa

Cover image for the Plata Rasa word card on the Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows

Achenia

a close-up of a bottle with an organic object inside

Nodrophobia

close-up of a stained shirt

Midsummer

a person standing in a garden holding a clock

Ellipsism

a hand clawing at a wall