Emotions as we think of them today emerged in the 1830s. Before then feelings were the intangible products of our souls, humours or even demons. Darwin explored emotions through science whereas Freud begged to differ, saying “it’s not easy to treat feelings scientifically”. Watt Smith approaches them through culture and language, arguing that “the meanings we charge an emotion with change our experience of it”. She cites the Pintupi of Australia, who have words for 15 kinds of fear, including “nginyiwarrarringu”, a spasm of fright that causes someone to jump up and look about them. This delightful A to Z celebrates the extraordinary diversity of feelings named by cultures around the world. They range from “basorexia”, which is a sudden urge to kiss someone, and “abhiman”, a 3,500-year-old Sanskrit word for bruised pride, through the German schadenfreude (enjoying someone’s misfortune), the Polish “żal” (a sense of melancholy for an irretrievable loss), to the Russian “toska”, which Nabokov exquisitely defined as “a longing with nothing to long for”.
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