Book review: The Book of Human Emotions is an exercise in managing slight frustration
Tiffany Watt Smith skips through her history of feelings, throwing out references to art, philosophy and literature, but doesn't quite satisfy the curiosity she stokes
You sent out the email two weeks ago for the Big Event. Forty-six friends. Too crass to ask for an RSVP. It's just a housewarming; not a wedding. Nobody replied. The invite said 8ish and it's 8.04. You check your email and your phone; you peek through the spyhole in the door; you listen for the lift.
You're in the grip of iktsuarpok, the Inuit term for the fidgety anxiety felt before the expected arrival of visitors.
Torschlusspanik (German for "gate-closing-panic") might set in when the guests start arriving and you realise you've forgotten to add a drizzle of balsamic vinegar to your signature canapes. But as the night turns into a blazing success, you may feel exuberance. If you're a speaker of Welsh, you'd call this hwyl - literally a boat's sail. Basorexia - a sudden urge to kiss someone - may grip you.
And as you say goodbye to the last guest, close the door and survey your empty home, a wave of awumbuk washes over you - the oppressive emptiness that comes when visitors depart, according to the Baining people of Papua New Guinea.
Tiffany Watt Smith, a research fellow at the Centre for the History of the Emotions at Queen Mary, University of London, has collated these and 151 other feelings in The Book of Human Emotions. The book aims to help us better understand our assumptions about where our emotions come from. This is increasingly important, she says, because our emotions are "measured by governments, subject to increasing pharmaceutical intervention by doctors, taught in our schools and monitored by our employers".