How can we be kind to each other, to other creatures, and to the world?
Sisu, Emilia Lahti, and the Glossary of Happiness
The Glossary of Happiness - The New Yorker
Last summer, Tim Lomas flew from London to Orlando to attend the fourth annual congress of the International Positive Psychology Association-held, naturally, at Walt Disney World. As Lomas wandered around the event, popping in and out of various sessions, he stumbled upon a presentation by Emilia Lahti, a doctoral student at Aalto University, in Helsinki.
newyorker.com
The word SISU is my new favorite word!




@Eilis check out the Lexicon of Happiness:
http://www.drtimlomas.com/#!alphabetical-lexicography/b5ojm
Positive psychology leads to new kind words.
Quote from the article:
Last summer, Tim Lomas flew from London to Orlando to attend the fourth annual congress of the International Positive Psychology Association—held, naturally, at Walt Disney World. As Lomas wandered around the event, popping in and out of various sessions, he stumbled upon a presentation by Emilia Lahti, a doctoral student at Aalto University, in Helsinki.
Lahti was giving a talk on sisu, a Finnish word for the psychological strength that allows a person to overcome extraordinary challenges. Sisu is similar to what an American might call perseverance, or the trendier concept of grit, but it has no real equivalent in English. It connotes both determination and bravery, a willingness to act even when the reward seems out of reach. Lomas had never heard the word before, and he listened with fascination as Lahti discussed it. “She suggested that this has been really valued and valorized by the Finns, and it was an important part of their culture,” he told me. At the same time, Lomas said, Lahti framed sisu as “a universal human capacity—it just so happened that the Finns had noticed it and coined a word for it.” The conference ended the next day, but Lomas kept thinking about sisu. There must be other expressions like it, he thought—words in foreign languages that described positive traits, feelings, experiences, and states of being that had no direct counterparts in English. Wouldn’t it be fascinating, he wondered, to gather all these in one place?
Soon after Lomas returned to the University of East London, where he is a lecturer in applied positive psychology, he launched the Positive Lexicography Project, an online glossary of untranslatable words. To assemble the first edition—two hundred and sixteen expressions from forty-nine languages, published in January—he scoured the Internet and asked his friends, colleagues, and students for suggestions. Lomas then used online dictionaries and academic papers to define each word and place it into one of three overarching categories, doing his best to capture its cultural nuances.
The first group of words referred to feelings, such as Heimat (German, “deep-rooted fondness towards a place to which one has a strong feeling of belonging”). The second referred to relationships, and included mamihlapinatapei (Yagán, “a look between people that expresses unspoken but mutual desire”), queesting (Dutch, “to allow a lover access to one’s bed for chitchat”), and dadirri(Australian Aboriginal, “a deep, spiritual act of reflective and respectful listening”). Finally, a third cluster of words described aspects of character. Sisu falls in this category, as do fēng yùn (Mandarin Chinese, “personal charm and graceful bearing”) and ilunga (Tshiluba, “being ready to forgive a first time, tolerate a second time, but never a third time”).
I love that word too!!! Sisu. So succinct and pretty.
Yes!
Had you heard it before?
No! I learned a new word today! 😁
Now I want to think of other concepts/emotions that we need words for..
Well that is fabulous!
I have a bunch on my website.
I will make a Words tag and post new words here regularly.
But only if the words are kind.
good idea! :)
I wonder why that gif is sweet.
honey bees?!?!?! I love bees!!!
@merthsoft you'll like this guy
@ifindkarma my dad has bees :)
@alivelystory I wonder if there's a lively story behind your dad's bees? :)
@merthsoft bee high five!