A few months ago I read about the Portuguese word saudade. Wikipedia tells you the word means a deep emotional state of nostalgic or profound melancholic longing for an absent something or someone that one loves. Moreover, it often carries a repressed knowledge that the object of longing may never return.
That’s pretty awesome, I thought to myself. Why don’t more people know that word?
Except now that in the last ten or so books I’ve read, saudade has been in five or so of them. Clearly I missed the message that saudade was the it word I was supposed to be using.
Then in Kristen Lavrandsdatter, which didn’t have the word saudade in it, although who knows, perhaps the newer translation does, I learned the word rime, which living in the horrible northern part of the world where I am confident that winter will never end this year and we will be frozen forever, is strange that I didn’t learn this word until now. Wikipedia tells you the word means a white ice that forms when the water droplets in fog freeze to the outer surfaces of objects. It is often seen on trees atop mountains and ridges in winter, when low-hanging clouds cause freezing fog. This fog freezes to the windward (wind-facing) side of tree branches, buildings, or any other solid objects, usually with high wind velocities and air temperatures between −2 and −8 °C (28.4 and 17.6 °F). Another useful word, which, since January, has appeared in four books I’ve read. So I guess I’m expanding my vocabulary.
Then it’s starting to become one of those Reader’s Digest Improve Your Wordpower or whatever that thing is called. I have a friend, for whom English is her third language, but due to spending a lot of time with a dictionary, knows a lot of more obscure or archaic words, which she often puts into conversation to the befuddlement of native English speakers, and I think of her as I am reading The Mask Game, which is not particularly appealing to most people, including myself, and it seems the same thing. The non-English author has an amazing vocabulary, possibly due to dictionary diving, and I look up a word every few pages or so. Some are scientific words, some are possibly made up because they aren’t in my kobo dictionary, some may be transliterated directly from Ukrainian or Russian. This book is long and has aliens in it and ghosts and an inability to pick a verb tense, which I am going to say is not on purpose but due to less-than-stellar copy-editing. I didn’t think this book would be this long, and the claim that it was all done with automatic writing, which Wikipedia tells you is an alleged psychic ability allowing a person to produce written words without physically writing. The words are claimed to arise from a subconscious, spiritual or supernatural source, which seems grossly unfair in that if I could outsource my writing to the spirit world, I would too (and I’m writing a story about faeries right now, so any faeries are welcome to apply), but instead, I’m stuck using my own hands and my own ideas to make stories that don’t use as advanced a vocabulary and are unfinished because of Tesfa snow days and the fact that I write slowly and the fact that I spend most of my time thinking about things that are not useful for writing.
So all the things I don’t know.