Obscure Words for Everyday Feelings

Chagrin refers to the anxiety or distress one feels when one is embarrassed or disappointed, or frustrated by one’s own failure. It often appears in the phrase to one’s chagrin.

She dropped out after her sophomore year to focus on the group, but by the time Burnett expressed interest in working with her, Potter was yearning to strike out on her own, much to the chagrin of her bandmates: “They would always say, ‘Don’t go Gwen Stefani on us.’”
— The New York Times, 26 May 2025

In French, chagrin means “grief” or “sorrow,” and can also be an adjective meaning “sad.” Some etymologists have linked this word to another French word chagrin, referring to rough leather or skin.

The clinical term anhedonia describes an absence of pleasure felt in the presence of something that normally gives you pleasure. The word combines the negative prefix an- with the Greek root hēdonē, meaning “pleasure” (as found in hedonism).

Yoga, for Dederer, started out as an attempt to fix something that was wrong: not just searing back pain, but her tremor, her anxiety, her anhedonia, her judgemental nature, her marriage.
Dani Shapiro, The New York Times Book Review, 26 Dec. 2010

Paramnesia is the clinical term for any disorder of memory (as the inability to distinguish between real life and the fantastic), though it more typically applies to what is more commonly and colloquially known as déjà vu. It occurs when something you are experiencing for the first time feels as though it isn’t really new. The term was introduced by a German psychiatrist, Emil Kraepelin, in 1886.

Leucocholy is defined as “a state of feeling that accompanies preoccupation with trivial and insipid diversions.” (Seeking distraction on the internet would seem to meet this description.)

The word is attributed by many to the 18th century poet Thomas Gray, who created the nonce word by replacing the first half of melancholy (melan-, meaning “black” or “dark”) with the New Latin spelling of the Greek leuko, meaning “light.” In a 1742 letter, Gray writes of “white Melancholy, or rather Leucocholy, for the most part; which though it seldom laughs or dances, nor ever amounts to what one calls Joy or Pleasure, yet is a good easy sort of state, and ça ne laisse que de s’amuser.”

Esprit de l’escalier literally means “wit (or spirit) of the staircase”—the stairs in question being those down which you leave a party or other gathering. The notion behind the phrase is that feeling when you think of the perfect response to another’s question or comment only once you’ve left the party and are on your way home.

The French encyclopedist Denis Diderot (1713-1784) is credited with introducing the notion of esprit de l’escalier. The sensitive man, he wrote, when absorbed by the words of another, tends to lose his mind “and recovers it only at the bottom of the stairs.”