The Cabinet of Calm E-Book

Paul Anthony Jones

• Herausgeber: Elliott & Thompson
• Kategorie: Bildung
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 196

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020

Beschreibung

_____ 'Proper words, healing words, magic words. Buy for your friends, keep one for yourself.' Simon Mayo With fifty-one linguistic remedies, The Cabinet of Calm is a beautiful little book that will lift your spirits and calm your mind. Collected here are soothing words to bring fresh hope. Words to inspire creativity, to encourage fellow thinking and community spirit. Words that reassure you that you're not alone: someone else has felt like this before and so there's a word to help, whatever the challenge. In essence, here are kind words, for these unkind times. Discover the perfect comforting word; a soothing tonic from The Cabinet of Calm. 'A magical little book [that] seeks… to offer reassurance, inspiration and hope.'Daily Mail

Leseprobe

CONTENTS

Introduction

AGANIPPE

for when you’re lacking inspiration

AGATHISM

for when you’re feeling disillusionment or struggling to remain positive

ALLABORATE

for when you’re disappointed with progress

ANACAMPSEROTE

for when you’re in a struggling relationship

ANGEL-VISITS

for when you’re missing your friends

ANTIPELARGY

for when you’re missing your family

APHERCOTROPISM

for when you’re facing obstacles

ARMOGAN

for when you’ve missed an opportunity

AUTOSCHEDIASM

for when you’re stuck in a rut

BEAUTÉ DU DIABLE

for when you’re worried about losing your looks

CARPE NOCTEM

for when you feel you’re running out of time

CATACOSMESIS

for when you’re feeling disorganised or muddled

CHALCENTROUS

for when you’re facing a challenge

CULTELLATION

for when you’re feeling overwhelmed

DOLORIFUGE

for when you’re overcome with sadness

DRUERY

for when a relationship is ending

EUCATASTROPHE

for when you’re feeling pessimistic

EUSTRESS

for when you’re feeling stressed

EXTRAVAGATE

for when you’re feeling bored or lacking a challenge

FROWST

for when you’re feeling exhausted

GADWADDICK

for when you’re feeling work-weary

GROWLERY

for when you’re in a bad mood

HEAFGANG

for when you’re feeling homesick

HIGH-METTLE

for when you’re lacking courage

HOWFFY

for when you’re feeling uncomfortable away from home

HURKLE-DURKLE

for when you have the Monday-morning blues

INTERFULGENT

for when you’re feeling bleak or you lack hope

KENGOOD

for when you’re dealing with regret

MELIORISM

for when you’re worried about the future of the world

MINDING

for when you miss someone

MONTH’S-MIND

for when you’re in mourning

MOOREEFFOC

for when you’re losing interest or lacking inspiration

NUGIFRIVOLOUS

for when you’re obsessing over unimportant things

OPSIMATHY

for when you’re feeling held back by age

TO PIPE IN AN IVY LEAF

for when you feel like a failure

PSAPHONISE

for when life seems to lack reward or purpose

REDAMANCY

for when your love is unrequited

RESPAIR

for when you’re in despair

SELF-SOOTHE

for when you’re having trouble sleeping

STOUND

for when you’re grieving

STRAVAIG

for when you’re feeling confused or muddle-headed

SYMMACHY

for when you see someone struggle

TERTIUM COMPARATIONIS

for when you’re dealing with disunion

TRAUMATROPISM

for when you’re worried about the environment

VILLEGGIATURA

for when you’re feeling city-weary

VIOLON D’INGRES

for when you’re work obsessed

WORLDCRAFT

for when you’re worried about ageing

THE WORSE THE PASSAGE, THE MORE WELCOME THE PORT

for when you’re struggling or losing hope

XENODOCHY

for when you’re confronting xenophobia

ZENOBIA

for when you’re suffering from impostor syndrome

ZIVILCOURAGE

for when you witness wrongdoing or fail to take action

Acknowledgements

About the author

INTRODUCTION

You probably shouldn’t be reading this book. Don’t take that the wrong way – truly, I’m very grateful that you are. But here on this opening page, I can’t help but feel that it would be nice if we weren’t here at all.

There are two reasons why. First of all, this is a book dedicated to words for many of the toughest, most challenging and most worrying times any of us can face. There are chapters here dedicated to unpalatable subjects such as despair and sadness, loss and grief, homesickness and exhaustion. We’ll discuss concerns about the state of the world, how fractious and disunited the twenty-first century has proved to be, and how perilously balanced we find the current state of our planet and its environment.

But while the chapters that follow are all dedicated to some troublesome challenge, attached to each is also one of the dictionary’s more unusual words or phrases, which, I hope, can give us some much needed aid, reassurance and optimism. The words included here aren’t cures as such – the dictionary is an extraordinary thing, but it has yet to come up with a solution for climate change – but rather just some calmative, curative food for thought. These are words to soothe an unquiet mind. To inspire and motivate our creativity. To encourage fellow thinking and community spirit, and to give us fresh hope. In essence, collected here are nothing but kind words, for these unkind times.

It would be nice to think, then, that such a list would not be necessary; if everything were forever right in the world, there would be no demand for this book. Alas, that is not the case. Our world is facing countless challenges, and the times we live in are turbulent and difficult. We each have our own stresses and worries on top of that too – grievances and sadnesses, which every one of us is processing and carrying with us, every moment of every day. Which brings us to the second, and somewhat more personal, reason why this book should perhaps not be in your hands.

In 2018, my dear mam passed away. Then, just eleven weeks later, early in 2019, my dad passed away too. Both of them had been unwell for a long time, but I doubt anyone in our family expected circumstances to play out the way that they did, as swiftly as they did. It was, understandably, an especially cruel and challenging time.

In the aftermath of it all, I determined that I would take some much needed time off. I was tired – more exhausted than I’d ever been in my life – and I needed to recharge my batteries. Maybe I would travel? Finally go and see my good mate out in Australia? After a year of endless hospital appointments and visiting hours, I finally had the time to think about things like that. Just imagine all things I could do with it!

And then, I got an email.

My wonderful publishers – responsible for the book you now hold in your hands – had had an idea.

For almost a decade now, I’ve written about the oddities and origins of the English language, and in that time have amassed a vast collection of some of its most unusual and remarkable words. How many of these words, my publishers wondered, could be applied to difficult, challenging times – precisely like the ones I had just endured? It was a tantalising idea, unlike anything I’d ever read (or, for that matter, written) before. But, then again – what about my time off ? And what about Blake out there in Australia, still waiting for me to go out and visit him after ten years? (Sorry, Blake – it will happen one day . . .) Did I really want to embark on a new project so soon? As it turned out, the answer to that particular question was hanging up in a clothes shop, just a few miles from my home.

A month or so after my dad had passed away, I found myself ambling around the city centre near my home here in Newcastle, stretching my legs, taking my mind off things – and mulling over the idea that my publishers had pitched to me. Almost without thinking, I wandered into a clothes shop on the high street, and there, hanging on one of the rails, was one of my dad’s shirts. Not a particularly meaningful one – not a favourite of his, nor some designer name – just a shirt. But seeing it there almost knocked me off my feet.

From nowhere, the events of the previous months came flooding back. It seemed finally to dawn on me that my wonderful parents, after a year of horrors neither of them deserved, had both gone. I would never see or speak or laugh with them ever again. And this shirt – this simple, not particularly meaningful shirt – was the proof of precisely that.

Needless to say, I had to leave the shop.

Oddly, that sudden rush of re-remembered grief vanished almost as quickly as it had arrived, and by the time I was back outside on the high street, I was fine again. The entire episode had lasted perhaps less than thirty seconds. Perplexed by the entire thing, I stopped to buy a coffee, set off walking home, and had just one thought in my mind: there’s a word for that.

A few years before the Shirt Incident, I stumbled across the word stound in an old Scots dialect dictionary I’d bought from a second-hand bookshop in St Andrews. A stound, this dictionary told me, was a sudden pang of grief when a loss is unexpectedly remembered. When I had first found this word, it struck me as interesting, so I posted it on Twitter, and pulled together a short blog post about it. But now, several years later – having lived through and now experienced precisely what that word encapsulated – it finally struck me how meaningful and important that humble-looking word actually is. But it also struck me that, somehow, having a word like that in my linguistic armoury, to describe that awful rush of pain and sorrow, felt comforting: it meant that someone, somewhere, at some point in the past had experienced precisely the same thing themselves – to such an extent, in fact, that they felt compelled to invent a word for it. Somehow that made it feel as if I wasn’t the only one struggling through this awful time. And for every word like stound, I reasoned, there had to be countless others out there that could provide some similar reassurance and solace, and bring a little bit of comfort to the toughest of tough times.

My mind was made up. I needed to write this book.

So now, here it is. The word stound is here, of course, alongside fifty more of the English language’s most obscure and extraordinary words. And every single one of them is, it’s hoped, in some way fit to assuage some of the pain and anguish from some of life’s challenges, offer a little inspiration and food for thought, and some soothing reassurance.

Perhaps we’d all still not rather be here – after all, it really would be nice to think that bad things don’t happen. But now that we are all here, let’s see if we can help each other out.

AGANIPPE

for when you’re lacking inspiration

‘You can’t wait for inspiration,’ Jack London famously said. ‘You have to go after it with a club.’ In a sense, he was right. The longer you sit with a blank page or a blank canvas in front of you (even if it’s only a metaphorical one), the more likely it is that your thoughts will wander, time tick by, and what little inspiration or motivation you might have had will be soon swallowed up by daydreams and self-doubt. Rather than busy yourself with the work at hand, you end up questioning your ability to do it, questioning why you’re doing it and questioning how worthwhile it would be even if you were to do it at all.

And still, throughout it all, that blank page remains steadfastly there.

It’s perhaps for good reason that the word inspiration derives from the same root as words such as respiration and perspiration: descended from the Latin spirare, meaning ‘to breathe’, etymologically inspiration is the ‘breath’ of life or action, while to be inspired is to breathe life into whatever task you have at hand. Suffering a lack of inspiration can consequently feel stifling. Without that animating stimulus to kick-start your work, your thoughts can feel held back, your ideas choked and the task at hand ever more lifeless.

The word spirit itself derives from that same life-giving Latin root too – which is somewhat appropriate, given that inspiration was originally applied only in religious contexts, to describe acts (and later, works of scripture and theological literature) supposed to have been produced by authors under the direct guidance of God. Unfortunately, it’s unlikely that some kind of divine intervention is going to help you finish off that office presentation, fire away that email currently languishing in your drafts, or come up with a crowd-pleasing one-liner for your best man’s speech. And if you’re waiting for the hand of some almighty power to step in and pen the perfect opening line of that novel you’ve been promising to write for years, then you might be in for a long wait. Instead, what you need is an Aganippe.

An Aganippe (pronounced ‘ah-gah-nip-ee’, along the same lines as Mississippi) is a source of literary, poetic or artistic inspiration. In Greek mythology, it was the name of one of two fountains at the foot of Mount Helicon, the grand mountain in central Greece held sacred by those sister goddesses of art and artistic inspiration, the Nine Muses. Legend has it that the waters of both the Aganippe (whose name combines the Greek words for ‘sweet’ and ‘horse’) and its neighbouring stream the Hippocrene (literally the ‘horse-fountain’) sprang from hoof-prints of the magnificent winged horse Pegasus. Given such impressive origins and surroundings, it was understandable that drinking the fountain’s crystalline waters was thought to be a sure-fire method of reinvigorating one’s poetic and artistic inspiration.

It would be nice to think that nothing more than a refreshing mouthful of cool spring water could magically cure a creative logjam, but in truth there is no quick fix. With no magical stream to sup from, writers in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries instead raided the Greek myths themselves for their inspiration, adopting the words Aganippe and Hippocrene (and even muse itself ) as bywords for whatever or whoever inspired their work. And it’s that approach that can be useful to us today.

No matter the task at hand, when stimulus or motivation are in short supply, consider the Aganippe as a reminder that it always helps to turn to something that inspires you to help see your project through – no matter what shape or form that inspiration might take. It could be a favourite book, work of art or piece of music. It could even be a cherished place or walk – a much needed break in the open air to clear the mind and reboot your ideas. Or perhaps it will prove to be an energising, idea-bouncing conversation with a good friend or mentor.

Then again, perhaps the problem is less a lack of inspiration, and more an absence of motivation? In which case, your personal Aganippe might be the reward you promise yourself for when the task you’re currently struggling to finish (or start) is finally complete. After all, if you’re stuck in a lethargic rut, sometimes nothing more than the sense of relief or achievement you will feel when you finally chalk some longstanding task off your to-do list is enough to get those creative gears back in motion.

See also: autoschediasm, mooreeffoc, psaphonise

AGATHISM

for when you’re feeling disillusionment or struggling to remain positive

It can be difficult to stay optimistic when times are hard. Even the brightest and most upbeat of outlooks on life can be turned on its head by some unwelcome shift in circumstances or a run of tough luck. When those hard times seem to be all around us – personally, locally, nationally and even globally – then the weight of all those troubles and problems can prove even more difficult to escape. Your customary optimism drifts slowly towards pessimism and, as dark clouds gather on the horizon, it proves all too easy to sink into gloomy disillusionment.

Thankfully, there is a superb word worth holding on to at times like these (albeit a fairly obscure and unfamiliar one). To appreciate both it and the role it takes in our vocabulary fully, we first need to understand a pair of much more familiar words, whose meanings and origins are perhaps a little more complex than we might appreciate.

Today, we think of optimism as little more than a synonym for positivity or hopefulness, but that hasn’t always been the case. Derived from optimum, Latin for ‘best’, its roots lie in the philosophical writings of Gottfried Leibniz, an eighteenth-century German mathematician, thinker and inventor whose work across countless fields formed one of the cornerstones of the European Enlightenment.

In 1710, Leibniz published a collection of essays on ‘the Goodness of God, the Freedom of Man and the Origin of Evil’, called the Théodicée. In it, he introduced the theory that this world – our world – must surely be the greatest of all possible worlds. ‘As it is in mathematics when there is no maximum nor minimum’, he wrote, ‘everything is done equally – or, when that is not possible, nothing is done at all. So may it be said likewise . . . that if this were not the best [or] optimum among all possible worlds, God would not have produced any at all.’

In other words, Leibniz believed that any divine creator we wish to credit with the existence of our world must, we can presume, have been happy with their creation. If they were not, surely they would have been omnipotent enough, and felt compelled enough, to abandon this world and start again, improving on any mistakes or shortcomings in their grand redesign. Ultimately, the fact that this world and everything in it exists and continues to exist at all – regardless of its flaws and problems – proves without question that it is the best world that any great creative force could ever possibly have wrought.

Later writers and philosophers picked up on Leibniz’s theory and expanded on it, with his fellow Enlightenment thinker Voltaire first attaching the word optimism to it in 1737. So far from meaning simply ‘positivity’ or ‘hopefulness’, optimism referred originally to Leibniz’s grand notion that our world is the best of all possible worlds, where the most good can be achieved with the least amount of evil.

Whereas optimism derives from the Latin for ‘best’, its opposite, pessimism, came to us from the Latin for ‘worst’, pessimus. It first emerged somewhat later than its positive counterpart, in the late eighteenth century, as a general term for the worst or most deprived possible condition of something. As Leibniz’s theory became more widespread, however, pessimism came to be attached to a model or viewpoint entirely antithetical to it – namely, that this world is the worst of all possible worlds, as its innumerable flaws, inequities and imperfections bear out.

From these philosophical beginnings, it wasn’t until the nineteenth century that the meanings of optimism and pessimism finally began to broaden, and they began to be used, as they still are today, to refer merely to hopefulness and hopelessness, and positivity and negativity, respectively. Back when they still represented these two polar opposite theories – these profound and strictly defined outlooks on life – a third term was coined to occupy the middle ground between them. Between the two extremes of optimism and pessimism lies agathism – a word that is well worth holding on to when times turn hard and it becomes difficult to see a tolerable future.

In 1816, Dr George Miller, a fellow of the Royal Irish Academy, gave an address in which he spoke of a colleague at the University of Dublin who considered himself ‘not an optimist, but an agathist’. His colleague, Miller continued, ‘did not think himself competent to determine what was absolutely the best’, but despite the obvious problems and flaws in the world today, nevertheless believed that ‘everything tended to good’. It was Dr Miller’s speech that seemingly first sparked interest in the term agathism, and from there the word fell into occasional use in nineteenth-century philosophical discussions as the implications of Dr Miller’s address – and his colleague’s personal outlook on life – began to be considered more widely.

Agathism is ultimately defined as the doctrine that all things tend eventually to work towards the good, but the means of getting there – and of deciding precisely what constitutes good and bad – might not be easy. It is possible, the so-called agathist believes, for this world to be on an ever improving trajectory while still suffering flaws and setbacks, troubles and countless imperfections. Indeed, sometimes these flaws and setbacks are necessary in order to learn from our mistakes and build and prepare for a fairer, better and more robust world in the future. Agathism stands as a more level-headed alternative to optimism and pessimism; elements of both viewpoints are accepted, but the world is not seen so extremely as the ‘best’ or ‘worst’ of anything. For that reason, etymologically, agathism simply derives from agathos, the Greek word for ‘good’.

No matter which of these theories seems to strike a chord with you, agathism can be a timely reminder that, although things might not be quite so bright right now, they will be brighter in the future. All we have to do is wait, enduring the bad times as best we can, and focusing on the good times that will – no matter how distant they might feel at the moment – eventually return.

See also: eucatastrophe, interfulgent, meliorism

ALLABORATE

for when you’re disappointed with progress

It’s not a particularly comforting thought, but disappointment really is a fact of life. Best intentions and ideas can be all too easily thwarted and dashed – often by little more than a simple change of circumstance or fortune that no amount of preparation could have prevented.

It might be a familiar feeling, but disappointment can nevertheless sometimes prove a difficult emotion to navigate, not least because it so often follows a lengthy period of exhaustive preparation, or nervous, adrenaline-raising anticipation. How much more crushing does a disappointment feel when we’ve allowed ourselves to daydream beforehand about how wonderful the future could be, only to have it fail to come to pass, or fall far short of our heightened expectations? One word for this is anticipointment, widely claimed as having been coined in a 1960s American ad campaign for greetings cards.

As for our all-too-tempting propensity to indulge in unrealistic daydreams, destined only to end in disappointment, there’s a word for that too – and attached to it is a wonderful tale of ruinous pride and thoughtless ambition: Alnascharism.

Alnaschar, according to The Story of the Barber’s Sixth Brother in the Arabian Nights anthology, was a tradesman in ancient Baghdad. Having inherited a modest sum of money from his father, Alnaschar decided to invest it all in a basket of glassware, which he intended to sell for a grand profit from his stall in the local marketplace. As he sat waiting for his first customer, however, he allowed his mind to wander, and he began to indulge himself in imagining how his ambitious money-making scheme would ultimately – and undoubtedly – triumph.

By continually reinvesting all of his profits in ever more valuable merchandise, he would keep doubling his investment and eventually become wealthy enough to live in a grand palace. Once there, he would win the heart of the local vizier’s beautiful young daughter. As his thoughts grew ever more wild and unrealistic, Alnaschar began to picture himself as a magnificent and imperious power-crazed tycoon, formidable enough to treat everyone around him with disdain and contempt. Now entirely lost in his daydreams, he finally envisaged an angry confrontation with the vizier and his beautiful new bride, and, in his imagined rage, lashed out wildly – only to snap out of his daydream to find that he had kicked over his basket of glassware and smashed it all to pieces on the stony ground. In the end, he was left with nothing – aside from his unfulfilled dream. It is from this tale that we have adopted the word Alnascharism