We need more words.

The English language, beautiful as it is, can seem deficient at times, as when one struggles to find a word to encapsulate a specific feeling or unique experience. At such moments, languages like German or Chinese seem to permit the expression of a wider range of phenomena. I wish there was an English word, for instance, to express “the unexpected delight of stumbling upon a rooftop garden after lunch.” Or how about a word for, “a spot of tranquility amid the cacophony of a squalid city”? Not that it’s the restaurant’s only selling point (as I acknowledged in my review of the food, I did enjoy my frittata, despite its lack of any accompaniment. Here’s another word we need: “Shortcoming of a dish due to its lack of sides or garnishes”), but that garden outside Redbird is the best thing about the place: it’s the reason why I’m giving this restaurant an A- and why I fully intend to go back. A couple of other patrons discovered the garden as well shortly after we did, but for a brief while, it was like Charlie and I had that tiny concentration of flora all to ourselves. The garden was well-kept, and standing there amid the clean rows of flowering shrubs and bushes, one can forget, for a moment, the pollution and trash that have become a trademark of the city around this building. Of course, our modern immersion into effluvium is far more profound and complete than just the visible garbage that covers our city streets. From the microplastics that involuntarily season our food, to the inane TikTok videos that imperceptibly chip away at our attention spans, to the AI-generated dross and disinformation that inexorably poisons our minds; it’s all garbage.

Spring is the Marie Kondo in me, and, though I can only watch in helpless consternation as chemicals pollute our material world and ignorance inundates our social world, I wonder how I can clear out some of the debris in my own life; detoxify my own body of contaminants both physical and psychical. My vegetarianism is an attempt to minimize the toxins that would otherwise be accumulating in my body. Apparently, even the air we breathe is contaminated with microplastics nowadays, but at least, I’m trying! I realize, however, that in other ways, I’m regularly accumulating more trash into my life. Every time I buy a new dress or a new pair of boots, for example, that stands very little chance of ever getting worn, what am I really doing, if not creating a new piece of junk that I’ll hold onto for a number of years, before finally summoning up the resolve to toss it in the garbage bin? And when I do finally throw it out, it will be vastly satisfying, and I’ll marvel at how excited I was when I bought that piece of junk and why I’ve allowed it to gather dust in my closet for all those years. There are no English words to accurately capture what I’m talking about here; given this linguistic deficit, I am forced to coin my own words by borrowing from the Germans: (1) Überschussleere (noun) the feeling that one has too much stuff, yet, paradoxically, also not enough; comprised of the German words for “excess” (Überschuss) and “void” (leere), and (2) wegwerfenfreude (noun) the satisfaction and relief one feels when finally throwing out an item one was super excited to buy but which has since languished in one’s closet gathering dust, taking up space, and making one feel guilty about one’s consumerism; comprised of the words, “wegwerfen” (toss away) and “freude” (joy). We could all certainly do with less garbage in our lives, but words are the anti-trash. We need more words.