Hello my droogs!! It’s Macabre Monday again, praise be to He Who Walks Behind the Rows! A Note from

about words and made up languages and since I love a good rabbit hole I gladly fell down this one.

Here’s Scoot’s Note in full:

Is there a word in another language that captures the feeling if being sad you cant experience something for the first time again?

Can we invent this word? Who runs the worlds languages, I’ll write them a letter in Esperanto.

As to the first part, I found a few words akin to this kind of melancholy and since longing and nostalgia are frequent themes in horror, I decided to include them in today’s Note.

Hiraeth: A Welsh word for longing for places you’ve never been to and can’t go. These are ancient places that no longer exist or perhaps never did.

From the web:

Rückkehrunruhe is a German word that is translated in the English language as “emerging from a transformative experience with the realization that you’re kind of no longer in that transformative experience,” Lele says. It’s a term that can describe how you feel after getting home from vacation and realizing that the memories from the trip are already starting to fade.

From my notes:

Sehnsucht: An Unexplainable Yearning

From Webster’s:

desiderium: an ardent desire or longing especially : a feeling of loss or grief for something lost

From Wikipedia:

Saudade: an emotional state of melancholic or profoundly nostalgic longing for a beloved yet absent something or someone. It is often associated with a repressed understanding that one might never encounter the object of longing ever again. It is a recollection of feelings, experiences, places, or events, often elusive, that cause a sense of separation from the exciting, pleasant, or joyous sensations they once caused. It derives from the Latin word for solitude.

None of these fit the bill exactly, but it’s hard to resist a good word.

As to part two of Scoot’s note, I got nothing, but there are a few examples of made up languages in horror that might provide a suitable candidate.

The most obvious to me was Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange. The language used by the main characters in the book is called an argot, a language invented to prevent outsiders from listening in. Burgess was heavily influenced by Russian in creating his argot for the novel. Droog, which I used above, is the Russian word for friend and is used frequently by Little Alex and his misanthropic pals.

I also have to mention H. P. Lovecraft. And while I’m not as well read in his works as some of the other Macabre Monday participants, I can say that R'lyehian, the language he made up for his story ‘The Call of Cthulhu,’ is a really fascinating bit of world building that has even been expanded on over the years by other authors. Lovecraft seems to have experienced a bit of hiraeth himself for worlds far beyond our own.

I nodded to Children of the Corn above as well as an example of how invented names and words in horror can become part of a cultural lexicon. At least part of the horror culture anyway. A prayer for Manon anyone?

So uh… this was a completely unorganized ramble of a post, but it hopefully sparked some word love. Any obscure words, or linguistic world building you want to share?

Let’s verb together.

Don’t forget to check out these masters of the frightful word!