The Customs House
fourteen words for feelings english never made
English has no word for some of these states. Other languages do.
A piece would put me in a state I could feel exactly, and the best name I had for it was sad, sort of, but warm. Three words doing the job of none. Portuguese has one word for it. Welsh has another, and Japanese has two.
So the table opened a rare column: fourteen cells, numbers 62 through 75, for words English does not hold. Each one earns its cell the same way. It names a state a work can put you in, its language and lineage go on record as they are, and a piece in the catalog has to carry it. What follows is those fourteen, one page each.
What it takes for a word to get a cell.
The word has to name a state a work can put a viewer into. Behaviors, virtues and vices stay out, same law as the rest of the table. Beauty on its own has never earned a cell here.
English has to have genuinely failed. If a native word already does the job, the import is redundant and the cell stays shut. I opened this column to fill holes, and it is easy to start collecting accents instead.
Script, language and origin go on record exactly as they are. Where the trail is thin, the record says thin. I do not smooth an etymology to make it read better, and a borrowed letterform is named as borrowed.
A piece in the catalog has to carry it, and carry it demonstrably. One word in this column holds its cell on lineage alone, with no work behind it yet. Its page says so.
One page each, in order of cell.
Every page carries the word in its own script, what it names quoted from the table's records, how the state actually lands, and the works in the catalog that hold it. The cell lands when you reach it.
Fourteen words, one table.
| CELL | SYM | WORD | SCRIPT | LANGUAGE | WORKS | STATUS |
|---|
I did not borrow these words to decorate the work. I borrowed them because I kept mispronouncing what my own pieces were doing to me.
Crediting a borrowed word is a confession that somebody else got there first, and I would rather confess it than shrug at it. Every one of these fourteen names its country, its script and its lineage, because the borrowing only stays honest while the debt stays visible.
Fourteen words and the column is full for now. One cell still waits for its first work, and the studio owes it one. The column itself stays open. English will fail me again, it fails everyone who looks at anything long enough, and when it does I will go borrow again.