The Evolution of the English Lexicon in the 21st Century

Something wonderful has started happening in the past few hours... a new word is going viral!

Sometime not too long ago, this image or one like it appeared in a corner of the internet. It's beautiful in the eloquence of its words, the simplicity of its image, and most importantly, the universality of its sentiment.

sonder
n. the realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own—populated with their own ambitions, friends, routines, worries and inherited craziness—an epic story that continues invisibly around you like an anthill sprawling deep underground, with elaborate passageways to thousands of other lives that you’ll never know existed, in which you might appear only once, as an extra sipping coffee in the background, as a blur of traffic passing on the highway, as a lighted window at dusk.

Sonder first appeared with this English-language definition at the Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows in November 2012. From the looks of Twitter, most users have no idea that this is not an archaic English word and have embraced it as their own.

This word can be real because we want it to be real, because it is a sentiment that we experience every day. As we move into the increasing connectivity and yet increased isolation of the digital world, we need a word like this to encapsulate our experience as just one tiny dot among 7 billion others.

Go viral, sonder. We need more words like you.

Accute Sense of Fernweh

I'll let this word speak for itself.

"These are my people," one student told me recently, pointing to her classmates. "I feel more at home with them than I do where I was born."

I hear that sentiment often; it comes with the realization that for all their transience and diversity, people who find their way there have much in common. I think of them as a peculiar tribe. A tribe for people unfit for tribalism. Their unwillingness or inability to settle — to embrace and be defined by one place only — draws them to each other. It makes them restless and curious. It helps them develop the sensitivity to multiple perspectives and the ability to work across cultures.

It also comes with a price. That price is struggling with the question of home and its troublesome acolytes: identity and belonging.

"The trouble with moving around and falling in love with new places," a colleague once shared, "is that you leave a piece of your heart in each of them." That resonated with my experience. In Italy, professionals working abroad are described as "runaway brains." My brain, however, never ran away. My heart just took it elsewhere.

















Gianpiero Petriglieri, "Moving Around Without Losing Your Roots" (October 2012)