Accord­ing to its author, The Dic­tio­nary of Obscure Sor­rows is the Upper Midwest’s third-largest com­pendium of the outer spat­ters of the emo­tional palette. Their mis­sion is to har­poon, bag and tag wild sor­rows then release them back into the subconscious.

“If we do not develop ade­quate images we will die out like the dinosaurs.” —Werner Herzog

Each def­i­n­i­tion is orig­i­nal and hand­crafted by John Koenig with his right thumb.

The author, John Koenig, is a free­lance cre­ative serf based in St. Paul, MN where he attended Macalester Col­lege in the early part of the century.

Read below a few examples:

Mauer­bauer­trau­rigkeit
n. the inex­plic­a­ble urge to push peo­ple away, even close friends who you really like—as if all your social taste­buds sud­denly went numb, leav­ing you unable to dis­tin­guish cheap polite­ness from the taste of gen­uine affec­tion, unable to rec­og­nize its rich and ambigu­ous fla­vors, its long and del­i­cate mat­u­ra­tion, or the sim­ple fact that each tast­ing is double-blind.

The bends
n. frus­tra­tion that you’re not enjoy­ing an expe­ri­ence as much as you should, even some­thing you’ve worked for years to attain, which prompts you to plug in var­i­ous thought com­bi­na­tions to try for any­thing more than sta­tic emo­tional blank­ness, as if your heart had been acci­den­tally demag­ne­tized by a surge of expectations.

Mona­chop­sis
n. the sub­tle but per­sis­tent feel­ing of being out of place, as mal­adapted to your sur­round­ings as a seal on a beach—lumbering, clumsy, eas­ily dis­tracted, hud­dled in the com­pany of other mis­fits, unable to rec­og­nize the ambi­ent roar of your intended habi­tat, in which you’d be flu­idly, bril­liantly, effort­lessly at home.

Ecsta­tic shock
n. the surge of energy upon catch­ing a glance from some­one you like—a thrill that starts in your stom­ach, arcs up through your lungs and flashes into a spon­ta­neous smile—which scram­bles your ungrounded cir­cuits and tempts you to chase that feel­ing with a kite and a key.

Fitz­car­raldo
n. an image that some­how becomes lodged deep in your brain—maybe washed there by a dream, or smug­gled inside a book, or planted dur­ing a casual conversation—which then grows into a wild and imprac­ti­cal vision that keeps scram­bling back and forth in your head like a dog stuck in a car that’s about to arrive home, just itch­ing for a chance to leap head­long into reality.