Expand Your (Super-Specific) Emotional Vocabulary

The Brian Lehrer Show | Jun 8, 2016

Think of a super-specific feeling. Like, the deep urge to kiss someone. Or the anxiousness that comes with thinking your phone rang when it didn't.

Tiffany Watt Smith, former theater director, research fellow at the Queen Mary University of London Centre for the History of the Emotions and the author of The Book of Human Emotions: From Ambiguphobia to Umpty – 154 Words from Around the World for How We Feel (Little, Brown and Company, 2016) offers an expanded emotional vocabulary, including from other languages, like the Welsh "hiraeth" or the Pintupi's "nginyiwarrarringu".

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