(all words are made-up)
Last year I read John Koenig’s Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, a fun little book that consists of a host of neologisms he has constructed to fill what he perceives as holes in the language. A representative example:
viadne
n. alienation from the crude machinery of your own body—like riding a ramshackle parade float that’s run by gremlins you can’t see, who toil away in darkness, pulling strings to move your limbs, kneading your guts and working the bellows, trying to further your modern agenda using nothing more advanced than a sackful of bones and splanchnic ganglia, zapped by sparks in primordial ooze.
Latin via, by way of + viande, meat. Pronounced “vee-ad-nee.”
The book is a good time, and was a very pleasant birthday present from the friend who got it for me. I don’t think much about most of it, but one of the words really stuck with me:
aubadoir
n. the otherworldly atmosphere just before 5 a.m., when the bleary melodrama of an extremely late night becomes awkwardly conflated with the industrious fluorescence of a very early morning.
French aubade, an ode to the morning + abattoir, slaughterhouse. Pronounced “oh-bah-dwahr.”
I know this word. I know the aubadoir of a college all-nighter, “working on an essay” with a girl you have an enormous crush on, and who doesn’t have class the next day such that it’s no big deal for her to stay up all night, even though you definitely have to be in a Latin class at 9:00 A.M. and you haven’t done any of the homework. Yes, you’ll remember this night for the rest of your life, remember it as a time of charged conversations and some legit philosophical inquiry. Yes, it’s the sort of thing college is for, debating Kant and Aristotle with a hot girl in a sort of fumbling, embarrassing manner. Yes, it was very fun. But as the morning sun starts to rise, and as the birds begin their antemeridian squawking, you realize that, oh no, you are going to fall asleep in Professor Woodruff’s class again, and she was not particularly impressed the first time, and you didn’t even finish your essays.
I know the aubadoir of a late-night fight with your wife, when you’ve both had too much to drink and have mostly forgotten what the genesis of the fight was, when some little disagreement about how best to take care of the dog has blossomed into an all-consuming, totalizing brawl that calls your whole project into question. She went to bed half an hour ago, upstairs, but you are still pacing the floor, drinking a little extra whiskey, just to keep the fire going. She was being manifestly unreasonable, but you can’t escape the undeniable fact that you were entirely too mean in response, so you pace and go over it all for the sixth time. The dog in question is staring at you uncomprehendingly, and you gesture at him occasionally as you mutter to yourself, and the light blares over the horizon and you begin to wonder if it’s actually going to be okay; if the illusion-shattering light of day may reveal that your marriage is not going to work after all.
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