To me, it seems like there are a whole range of uncharacterized emotions lacking English names, some so rare that you might feel them once in a lifetime, others coming up more and more often. No doubt there are other languages that can be raided for content, and I'd be curious what people suggest. But for now, I'll push on directly to three which I've come to describe, for myself, with regularized terms.

MOME is the cruel laughter of flowers. It is the feeling that ordinary life with all its trivial details is at once given terrible significance by some horrible circumstance. I remember first recognizing the emotion when seeing a simple drawing of a woman collecting flowers being approached by a Cthulhean monster that was distributed in an old D&D gaming book before it was outlawed. It took some time before I encountered other appropriate contexts: a man is shown in an AP photograph from a market bombed in Israel; he is crying, and sits lying back against a stand of watermelons. Suddenly my eyes notice the tiny red flecks on his face. It is as if the watermelons or the oblately curved centers of the flowers can look on and think, "as you thought you would cut us up and see what is inside us, now we have seen what is inside of some of your fellow shoppers..." But it's not something specific to plants, however they may incite it - for instance, I heard a story of a man who stayed in his office in the World Trade Center and exchanged e-mails with his wife about what was happening until the line went dead. There was no sense of mome in what happened to anyone that day, or to him ... until I thought of what he might have done if he'd had a cellular phone. I found myself whistling "El Cellular" over and over again in the next few weeks after that. It's the little, innocent decisions that create the sense of mome.

RATHE is the desire to just come out and say something. Or to wish that someone would just come out and show something that they are constantly dancing around mentioning, or denying altogether. I see some idiot film like "Con Air" where the hero is seen clearly shooting an unarmed man at the climax in the Vegas Strip, the most videotaped place on earth, and there is just this desire to sink my teeth into something - I wish I could fix their error and show this hero riding the electric chair for all his good deeds. I want the so-called Christians to come out and show their sick religious hell being inflicted, fire and brimstone and rapist demons and people being ground like hamburger, on every part of the body of some little Anne Frank because the Fuehrer decided she should be killed before she might have converted; to show that their God is a flunky who takes Hitler's orders to send such and such a girl to the fire like the minimum-wage guy takes your order at the fast food place, complete with little apron and name on the uniform... oh, I would just like to show them and show them sometimes, because they shrink back in such fear and revulsion from so little and there is so much.

MOME RATHE is the combination of the two emotions, or an intermediate between them. It is when you become aware of the bars of the cage around you; it is the sickening feeling of what is fake, unnatural, meaningless; it's what I really meant for "sad" when I said that "communing with nature is something noble, but communing with Nintendo is just sad" in the hikikomori thread in the News section. You look into a little cage of butterflies and mock them by putting up a little cartoon from the Onion, "You're pheromone-omenal" - and you think of how their whole lives are enlivened, or at least changed, by the sight of this one thing - and you feel their eyes facing out at you, grateful you wonder for this one little spot of interest - and you find yourself also, looking out... I go into Walgreen's. As I've said before, Madison has so many awful sources of mechanical noise, but someone has created a fix - for only $20, you can buy a little lit-up screen, looks almost like a computer screen, with a picture of a waterfall and a clever little shimmer that goes every few seconds in the background, and a tinny little electronic speaker that has about six seconds of what is supposed to be birds chirping - Jesus, I feel like that day I saw that I could have DIED of mome rathe.

someone's been reading their Lewis Carroll

Indeed. My borogoves are getting all mimsy.

(damn. just realised where I could have sourced a better screen name than the rather plain 'anna')

Joking aside, I think what you're describing there is postmodern angst. But I guess "mome rathe" works for it just as well.

Somebody better read than I am can help by supplying the episode from Foucault in which he sets out to experience the real small town main streets that Disneyland copies, then experiences the Disneyland version, and discovers with revulsion that he prefers it. That revulsion is mome rathe, am I right?

Komatta!

No word I know in English does it justice.

Is that the "somewhat concerned, pissed off, inconvenienced" one, Colin?

Japanese is full of words like that: zanshin, giri, even wa. Words that are instantly understood by a native speaker, but require a paragraph for translation to English.

Trying to think of a German word that would fit the bill, besides the words (concepts, that is)English has already adopted, like Schadenfreude and Weltschmerz. Not to mention Bildungsroman, if you're a lit geek.

It's translated as "troubled" sometimes, but really it means, "I have encountered some difficulty and I can't figure out what to do about it! Damn!" more or less.

There are many Spanish concepts without a straight translation, but often they have been translated or adopted.

One I use a lot is "hastío", which goes far beyond "aburrimiento" (boredom) to include lack of motivation, self-disgust and general lack of interest.

Just see the proposed translations to notice the difficulty:

hastiar: vt to bore, sicken, disgust

hastío: n weariness.

José

Thanks for some interesting ideas!

I'm not sure whether all of these things are what I'd think of as previously uncategorized emotions - does "Komatta"! convey an emotion distinguishable from frustration? Is Weltschmerz different from depression? And is Bildungsroman even a state of mind, or just a format of novel? But Schadenfreude, hastiar, and zanshin seem to be good candidates. I'm not sure about giri and wa - both seem to be rooted in the extraordinarily strong Japanese sense of "shame", which I don't really understand.

Regarding mome rathe, I don't see it as really being the same as postmodern angst. Postmodern angst, as best as I can figure out, seems to be some type of fear (of being fake? found out to be fake? of there being no reality? I don't know) felt by postmodernists (which I don't think I am). But neither mome, rathe, nor mome rathe is at all related to fear. Mome is perhaps closer to humor, pity, or sadness; rathe is more like anger or insight; mome rathe is more like disgust or depression.

Yes, the terms were half-derived from Carroll... the sound "mome" or "mum" came on its own, seemingly representative of the flowers (mums?) or of the oblate shape of a watermelon (insert Freudian explanation here). When I realized I regarded one emotion as a combination of the two others, "mome raths" came to mind, but "rath" doesn't work for obvious reasons. Besides, "rathe", rhyming with rage/rave/race seemed a proper sound for an emotion that seems to impose a fast and frenzied sort of thinking.

P.S. This word "Komata!" actually reminds me of another of my made-up terms... interjection "Fengfingnaegel!" [feng-fin-gnay'*-gel] meaning that someone (usually me) has thought of this exact problem and taken sensible precautions to prevent it, which (just now) didn't work... but that's not an emotion either.

Komatta is not quite the same as frustration. It's hard to explain (at least, too hard for me to explain now ).

Having learned Japanese before I spoke a lick of English, I'd loosely translate, "komatta," as "problems!!" If I had to utter the English equivalent, I'd probably say, "Fuck, me..."

I never really knew what it meant, but "komatta" was applied liberally in discussions about my behaviour when I was growing up.

I've only just started pretending to learn japanese (we've all gone through this stage, I think) but I had a thought last night. I expect a learned speaker to correct and mock me.

Words like 'wa' and 'no' and so forth, indicating possession and subjectness...because we're translating from kanji, are these words just additional marks in the symbol. In other words, is anata one symbol, and anata wa the same symbol with embellishment.

Sorry, earlier geek here. Point if ye wish. Mock if ye must.

since there is a separate chacter for 'wa' in hiragana, any hiragana spellings would have an extra character.
i don't even know kanji.

anata -

anata wa -

I meant a different 'wa' than the subject referent as in "watashi wa," "boku wa," and "anata wa". I was referring to the "wa" that I usually see translated as "harmony" or "peace of mind", but requires a long lesson on Japanese culture in order to be used correctly.

Actually, the "wa" that you use as particle is the hiragana usually pronounced "ha". Weird thing.

I don't think you should really consider sounds like "wa" "no" and "wo" to be words in the sense that we usually understand them. They are really metatextual signifiers (sorry) commenting on the relationship of various actual words in the sentence to each other. So all "wa" means, for example, is "the word in front of me is the subject of the sentence." If this seems odd, it's only another way of doing what many European languages do by changing the ending of a word to denote the object, for example (English still does it with "who" and "whom"). Most languages have linguistic traffic policemen like this to stop chaos developing. Now of course Lyran, my own native language, has words for concepts that don't exist anywhere on earth .... but you would expect that.

quote:

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Originally posted by colin:
It's translated as "troubled" sometimes, but really it means, "I have encountered some difficulty and I can't figure out what to do about it! Damn!" more or less.

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Sounds kind of like the american use of "shit"

As in I "Shit I banged my knee."

or "My teenager is acting like a shit"

of course we use the word for so much more

"I am the shit" (self compliment)

"this beer tastes shitty"

"You don't know shit"

"I'm so happy I could shit"

quote:

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Originally posted by pauline:
I never really knew what it meant, but "komatta" was applied liberally in discussions about my behaviour when I was growing up..

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So in other words they may have been saying something like, "Pauline I am sick of your shitty attitude. You'd better clean up your act!"