The biggest problem with languages
Last Sunday, a friend asked me how I was doing after a particularly challenging week, and I opened my mouth to answer, then just... stopped. Because "fine" wasn't right, but neither was "struggling". I wasn't sad exactly, but I wasn't okay either. I was somewhere in that unnamed territory between exhaustion and clarity, between frustration and acceptance.
And that's when it occurred to me that languages have a big problem. No, it’s not that some of them are ridiculously and unreasonably hard to learn(looking at you German🤨😒)
The real problem is simpler and more profound than we think.
We don't have enough words for what it means to be human.
The Gap Between Feeling and Speaking
Think about your last conversation where someone asked how you were. Really think about it. What did you say versus what did you really mean?
I bet you said something like "good", "okay", or "busy". But what were you really experiencing? Maybe you were tired but also excited about a project. Maybe you were grateful but also worried about something you couldn't control. Maybe you were that specific kind of content where everything's going well, but you're almost suspicious of it, waiting for the other shoe to drop.
There should be words for these states, don't you think?
The Portuguese have this beautiful word, saudade. It means a deep, nostalgic longing for something that's absent. But it's more than just missing something. It's that bittersweet ache when you remember your grandmother's kitchen, or the way summer evenings felt when you were twelve. English just... doesn't have that. We say "I miss it", but that's like describing a symphony as "nice sounds".
I started noticing this everywhere once I became aware of it. We have "love" for everything from pizza to our life partner. We use "tired" whether we need a nap or we're existentially exhausted. We say we're "stressed" when we might actually be overwhelmed, anxious, pressured, or just overstimulated. Imagine being asked to paint the rainbow with just the colours black and white. This is what it feels like.
We're trying to paint the full spectrum of human experience with a box of eight crayons.
Why Languages Evolved This Way
Languages didn't evolve to capture the full human experience. They evolved to help societies function.
Think about it. Early languages needed words for survival: food, danger, family roles, basic emotions that helped the tribe work together. Then, as civilizations grew, we needed words for trade, governance, and coordination. Modern languages are obsessed with productivity and efficiency. Look at how quickly we adopt business jargon and technical terms.
But the nuanced, personal, quietly complex parts of being human? Those got left behind. Because language is democratic in a way… words only get created and stick around if enough people need them often enough. But your specific emotional cocktail on a Tuesday afternoon while watching dust motes dance in sunlight? That's too personal, too unique to make it into the collective vocabulary.
I find this fascinating and a little sad. We've built languages that can describe quantum physics and market fluctuations with incredible precision, but we're remarkably clumsy when it comes to describing what it feels like to be alive.
There's something profound here about priorities, isn't there? What a culture names reveals what it values. And apparently, we've valued function over feeling, productivity over presence, the external over the internal.
Alright Bechem, what can I do about this?
1. Read the dictionary, every day, for 5 minutes.
I’ve started reading the dictionary. I know, I know. "Who reads the dictionary for fun?" But hear me out.
The dictionary is a catalog of human attempts to capture reality. Each entry represents someone, somewhere, trying to put language around an experience. Every definition is a small victory against the inadequacy of expression.
Reading the dictionary daily expands your emotional and intellectual vocabulary. Suddenly, you discover that what you thought was "sadness" might actually be Weltschmerz—the pain of the world. What you labelled as "tired" could be acedia—spiritual apathy or existential boredom.
You don't just learn new words… You discover new ways to think.
Five minutes a day. That's roughly 1,800 new words per year if you learn just five daily. In three years, you'll have a vocabulary that makes most people sound like they're speaking in crayon.
This has become my daily ritual. Five minutes with the dictionary, not to memorize definitions, but to discover pieces of human experience I'd never been able to name. And I’ve started thinking more clearly about my own emotional landscape.
When you can distinguish between loneliness and solitude, you make different choices about how to spend your time alone. When you know the difference between sadness and melancholy, you respond to each more appropriately.
Words are tools for understanding yourself.
I realized I'd been living with emotional crude oil for years… raw, unprocessed feelings I couldn't quite navigate because I couldn't quite name them.
2. Create your own words
Why can't we just... create words when we need them?
Every word in every language was invented by someone at some point. Shakespeare alone gave English over 1,700 words. "Bedroom", "eyeball", "fashionable"; all Shakespeare originals. If a playwright from 400 years ago could reshape language, what's stopping us?
So I started experimenting. When I encountered an experience without a name, I'd pause and ask myself: "What would I call this?" Then I'd either combine existing roots or just invent something that felt right.
Scrollnesia: that moment when you're scrolling through your phone and suddenly can't remember what you were originally looking for.
Completionvoid: the empty feeling after finishing a project you've been working on for months.
Anticipatigue: being tired from looking forward to something.
Some of these might already exist somewhere… languages are vast. But the exercise itself is valuable. It makes you more aware of the subtle textures of your own experience.
The Ripple Effect of Precision
Since I started doing these, I noticed that precision in language leads to precision in life.
When I can accurately identify what I'm feeling, I can respond more appropriately. When I know I'm experiencing anticipatigue rather than just being "tired", I don't reach for caffeine… I practice patience with the waiting itself. When I recognize completionvoid instead of just feeling "off", I can plan for that transition period after finishing big projects.
The words you have access to shape the thoughts you can think.
I make better decisions now because I understand my internal states more clearly. I communicate more effectively because I can be more specific about what I'm experiencing. And perhaps most importantly, I feel less alone with complex emotions because I've learned that many of these feelings are universal enough to have been named by someone, somewhere, at some time.
Your thoughts are constructed from words. Your self-talk is linguistic. Your memories are stored in narrative form. When you expand your vocabulary, you literally expand your capacity for thought, feeling, and experience.
This is why reading dictionaries is therapeutic and why creating words is necessary.
In a nutshell
I'm not suggesting we all become walking dictionaries or that we start making up words for everything. But I am suggesting something more personal: paying attention to the moments when existing words don't quite fit.
Instead of defaulting to "fine" or "weird" or "stressed", what if we paused and tried to be more precise? What if we gave ourselves permission to say "I don't know the right word for this" instead of settling for approximations?
And what if, when we encounter something truly unnamed, we allowed ourselves the playfulness of creating language for it? Not to impose it on others, but as a tool for our own understanding.
Language is living, evolving, growing. It doesn't belong to dictionaries or academics. It belongs to all of us. Every conversation is an opportunity to either perpetuate the poverty of expression or to push gently against its boundaries.
So tomorrow, maybe try this: when someone asks how you are, pause for an extra second. See if you can find a word that gets a little closer to the truth. And if you can't find one that fits perfectly, don't worry.
We're all making it up as we go along anyway.
The question isn't whether we'll ever have enough words to capture everything we experience. We won't. The question is whether we'll keep trying to build bridges across the gap between feeling and speaking, between the richness of inner life and the limits of expression.
I think we should. Even if our words always fall short, the attempt itself is profoundly human. And maybe that's enough.
If you want to develop the habit of reading the dictionary every day, I created a Notion template to help you document every new word you learn in a way that makes it easier for you to continue learning.
Every feature is built to make vocabulary growth addictive, effortless, and practical:
Quick Add Mode → Add new words in seconds without clutter.
Deep Dive Mode → Expand with definitions, synonyms, examples, origins, and more.
Daily Word Prompt → Wake up to one random word to master today.
Review Mode → Smartly reminds you which words to revisit so you never forget them.
Usage Tracker → Gamify learning by checking off words you’ve used in real conversations.
I’m Bechem Ayuk, a professional ghostwriter. I ghostwrite weekly newsletters for C-suite executives.
Discover the outcomes I create for executives, and how we can work together.
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Well said. I used to hang out in a small cafe which was open from morning to midnight. I'd spend a day from breakfast into the late evening eating light meals, drinking too much coffee and reading weighty thick books like Sartre's Being and Nothingness and Philosophies of Art & Beauty: Selected Readings in Aesthetics from Plato to Heidegger.
Because those type of books require sustained attention, I would be in some sort of quasi meditative state while reading, occasionally punctured by the server coming up to the table asking if I wanted a refill, or occasionally someone who sat next to me who just talked way too f&*king loud. This happened frequently because a) its cafe b) some healthy number of people came in and out while I was sitting there reading for hours and c) people sometimes can be incredibly unmindful about how loud they can be.
After several times of this completely understandable unintended interruption, I decided that whenever it happened I would just categorize in one word whatever they were talking about, and then go back to my reading. Primarily the intent was to put the interruption out of my mind. However, it grew to a curiosity to just to understand , in some general way, what is it that people are talking about so enthusiastically.
And the empirical results of the Interruption While Reading study, is that people speak in terms of "directives". People gave each directions to get somewhere, what to order on the menu, how to better buy useless $h*t on the Internet, how to get lower interest rates. I can only think of a singular incident when anyone blurted out something about an emotion, let alone expressed one. Nothing about art or how one feels about it (as a subject), you might hear "I love so and so" song.
I cant be too upset; the sharing of practical information, is why I would be handed a cup of coffee without cream. And my day-to-day practical observation that servers aren't paid a living wage, I left a tip equal to the cost of the coffee, scrambled eggs and toast.
So yeah there are very good evolutionary reasons why we share useful practical information. And, sadly (ahem ...searches thesaurus...) tragically perhaps, our practical sharing is usually only short term. I could share all kinds of useful information about climate change - and even though that information would meet a real test of practicality - it wouldn't be immediate in terms of impact but would be immediate in terms of the cost you might have to pay - and so it somehow goes out of our practical cafe lexicon window.
So I would say the title is a bit of a misnomer, (though effective click bait in my case) there is nothing fundamentally wrong with our languages (if one accepts their basic reflexive limit and as you point out their ultimate inexplicability) but rather what we choose to individually and collectively focus on and express. If there is any technique one could do themselves, I wouldn't suggest one. It would be too practical. Share an experience of something that makes someone else enjoy life more....and stay there with it, and (maybe) talk about it with them if they want to, and you'll come up with your own shared language. How about something "political"? Use that useful practical language to organize with a community a piece of public art that everyone can enjoy. They might not have much to say about the piece or art itself, but they will say "I know it is art because I know it when I see it," and maybe "You see that guy over there....he gives good tips."
Also, I think it’s mostly European languages that are so “limited”, beautiful as they are (every time I hear Spanish, it’s music for my ears). If you look at Hindi and Marathi, for example. These languages can express so many states of mind, body, emotions, etc., that many of us would struggle to understand what it is exactly that word is trying to pinpoint 😊