Eisce

Cover image for the Eisce word card on the Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows

Eisce

n.
the awareness of the infinitesimal role you play in shaping your own society—knowing that whenever you smile at a stranger, pronounce a word a certain way, laugh at a certain joke, or choose the slightly shinier apple, you are unwittingly helping to construct the world in which you live—a role both vanishingly small but also somehow daunting, making it that much harder to complain about the traffic, knowing that you are traffic.

Irish eisceacht, exception. Pronounced “ahy-shuh.”

Archimony

a person looking at broken furniture

Fellchaser

a blurred shadow of a person in a dark room

Nemotia

a city with clouds of smoke

Rubatosis

Cover image for the Rubatosis word card on the Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows

Grayshift

a spiral staircase from above

Rialtoscuro

a blurry image of a light source