What does it mean to 'sonder?' Author invents new words that resonate during the pandemic

Minnesota author John Koenig grew up feeling a bit "alien" as an American child transplanted in Switzerland, with his family.

Koenig, 38, now back in Minneapolis, says those childhood feelings of isolation during his decade in Geneva, a place he saw as a melting pot of cultures and languages, got him thinking about how few words the English language has for emotional states.

So like an Icelander or Inuit surrounded by snow, Koenig invented words to describe — in his case — his inner landscape.

"Language can crystallize things – something that felt like a cloud – and let you hold it in your hand. It's a beautiful thing," Koenig told The Sunday Magazine's Piya Chattopadhyay.

Koenig coined hundreds of words and collected them in his best-selling book, The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, for specific emotions or feelings that have no English word to encapsulate them.

Some are mash-ups from different languages. Many define states of sadness.

"I was always a bit of a loner. Childhood is necessarily kind of a lonely experience…I have always found joy in sadness and pensiveness. [An] existential crisis to me, that's a great Saturday night," said Koenig.

Words that define lonely

Koenig coined words such as:

• Aulasy: the sadness that there is no way to convey a powerful memory to people who weren't there at the time.
• Opia: the ambiguous intensity of looking someone in the eye, which can feel simultaneously invasive and vulnerable.
• Sonder: the realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own, in which you might appear only once, as an extra sipping coffee in the background.

Koenig started creating words on his personal blog in 2009 and created a YouTube video about the word sonder in about 2012.

It caught fire.

Now there are numerous cafes named sonder, from Santa Fe, New Mexico to Cape Town, South Africa – even one in Lethbridge, Alta.

"I think we like the fact that every stranger had their story," said Paul Demaere, owner of Sonder Coffee in Lethbridge.

"In a coffee shop … you have a lot of regular people but you have people that are all kinds of strangers to each other. So it's kind of fitting."

Koenig says therapists have emailed him explaining how just being able to name something, can offer people power — even solace.

Short, easy ways to convey complex emotions — from acronyms to emojis — are expanding the way we communicate, according to Lera Boroditsky, a cognitive scientist professor at the University of California San Diego.

'You are never alone in how you feel'

She says the very act of naming an emotion can help control the "physiological" response to it. "It gives us a little bit of control," said Boroditsky.

"[It] can make you feel like you're not alone, like you're connected to other people because you're not the only one that's having weird thoughts," said Boroditsky.

Since speaking with Chattopadhyay, CBC listeners sent The Sunday Magazine dozens of words they've since conjured. Sally Lesk of Ontario submitted Esperthud to describe how she felt for the first week of 2022.

It's a combo of the Spanish word esper (to wait, hope or wish) and … well, the sound of a thud.

Are these words 'real'?

While Koenig's new words intrigue some, they've already annoyed others.

Koenig said he's gotten flack over some words where he's misconstrued the original meanings of a root or mispronounced it. When this happens Koenig said he does not typically correct or change his words.

"Language is always going to evolve messily, and mistakes are part of that," Koenig said.

Some linguists are also unimpressed and doubt many will use these "made-up" words.

Linguistics is more than words and meanings to Geoffrey Pullum, a professor of Linguistics at the University of Edinburgh and co-author of the Cambridge Grammar of the English Language.

For him, it's "the invisible system that permits the construction of phrases and sentences."

Koenig's dictionary irks Pullum.

He says it's not important that English uses two words to name a machine gun, whereas in French it takes one: mitrailleuse.

"It would be absurd to think that if you speak only English you can't form the concept of a machine gun; yet that is essentially the error people are making when they say (for example) that the German word schadenfreude cannot be translated into English."

Inventing words is not new, of course.

"Our language is filled with words that were invented by authors throughout history," said Koenig, pointing to words like robot and serendipity as examples.

And he can't help seeing major holes in the English vocabulary.

"English is a tremendous sponge that absorbs from many other languages at the same time. [But] I find in intimacy, in relationships, the whole thing seems very limited," he said.

Koenig says he's thrilled when readers find connection through his words.

"You are never alone in how you feel. There's someone out there, like with sonder, for example, [telling me] I didn't know that anyone else had that thought."

Written by Yvette Brend. Produced by Peter Mitton.