How the Limits of One’s Own Language Can Impede Recognition of Certain Feelings

In of their incredibly insightful videos, the School of Life looks at how specific words within certain languages allow a person to easily access their feelings. Also addressed is how the limits of language can conversely impede the recognition of how a person feels.

The right words help us to know ourselves; through their agency, we can more accurately and securely identify the contents of our inner lives. The phenomenon becomes particularly apparent whenever we come across words in other languages that zero in on a feeling that our own language doesn’t have a succinct term for. We notice then just how much a good word can do to bring an emotion into focus.