Susie Dent: word to the wise

'Who cut your hair last?’ Words with which any new hairdresser can cut you to the quick. In my case, they bring back the memory of a trip to a German salon when I was 18, working as an au pair before university. Longing for the soft perm that was all the rage in the Eighties, I showed the stylist some photos of Cher looking gorgeous, her hair tumbling round her face in soft, shiny locks. This, I explained in my faltering German, was the look I was going for.

I emerged shock-faced with not only tight Deirdre Barlow ringlets, but with track-marks in between where the hairdresser had quite literally singed my scalp. For the next two bandanna-ed months I put up with the mocking giggles of the children in my care. Needless to say, my usual hairdresser was agog when I went back to her on my return. Instead of ‘Who cut your hair last?’ she spluttered, ‘Who did that?’

Had I known then that there is a word for emerging from the hairdresser looking far worse than when you went in, I would have taken a bit of comfort. In Japanese, age otori (pronounced ‘ah-gey-oh-tory’) means looking worse after a haircut. It expresses the situation whereby we murmur, ‘that’s great’ to the stylist as they show our new image in a mirror, even while we are dying a little inside.

I’ve spent the past two years charting the vocabulary of our emotions, unearthing words from English and other languages to articulate the complex array of feelings many of us experience every day. Anyone who has a dog, for example, will recognise the act of ‘groaking’, which involves looking longingly at someone else’s food (humans are also susceptible of course). Too many of us will also acknowledge the feeling of Eilkrankheit, German for ‘hurry sickness’, which describes the endless chasing of our tail as we rush from meetings to dentist appointments and other scheduled events.

As an antidote, it’s worth remembering the Japanese shinrin-yoku – ‘forest bathing’ – the perfect expression of the recombobulation we feel beneath a canopy of trees. (Japanese also offers us a synonym for comfort eating in kuchisabishii, which roughly translates as ‘eating because your mouth is lonely’.) How about ‘pregret’: knowing you’re going to regret something but doing it anyway? Or ‘idiorepulsive’, which describes the feeling of repugnance at one’s own reflection in the mirror? Do you turn the air blue when you stub your toe? ‘Lalochezia’ is the relief from anger or pain through swearing. For those who lie awake worrying about everything under the yet-to-rise sun, there’s the Old English uhtceare, ‘the sorrow before dawn’. Should this beset you for longer, you may be suffering a fit of gloom known in the 16th century as the ‘mubble fubbles’.

There are words for happier emotions, too. Which of us doesn’t take joy in ‘apricity’: the warmth of the sun on a winter’s day? ‘Respair’, meanwhile, means fresh hope, and a recovery from despair.

We are, of course, what we feel. Research has proved the more we articulate our feelings, the better we are able to cope with them. Just knowing others have felt horror upon leaving the hairdresser would have shielded me from the ensuing mubble fubbles. Then again, a bit of lalochezia might also have come in handy – if only I’d known there was a word for it.

Susie Dent’s An Emotional Dictionary (John Murray, £16.99) is out now

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