A Brief Note on Languorene
In The Backlog Is Dead, Long Live the Backlog, I said I owed newer readers an explanation of languorene.
This is that explanation.
If you encountered the word somewhere on Open Doors and thought, That is not a word, you are correct.
I made it up.
Or, more precisely, ChatGPT and I made it up sometime around the summer of 2023, back when ChatGPT mostly meant GPT-4 and I was using it through an old work account. I no longer have the original conversation, so the exact archaeological record is lost. But, I remember the problem.
I had a feeling I wanted to describe, and none of the words I knew were quite right.
It was calm, but calm felt too neutral. Serene was close, but almost too clean and weightless. Languor had some of the heaviness I wanted, that pleasant unwillingness to hurry, but it could shade too far toward exhaustion or listlessness.
I wanted something between them.
So: languor + serene = languorene.
I described it more recently in The Apostrophe Hill I Chose to Die On as a soft, heavy calm, something like the gentle gravity of rest. Elsewhere I’ve called it calm without numbness, rest without self-reproach, ordinary beauty allowed to be enough.
That is still about right.
Languorene is tea near a window when there is nowhere you need to be. Quiet water. Sitting with someone you love without needing to fill the silence. The peculiar luxury of realizing, for a little while, that nothing needs improving.
There was already language near the thing.
I just didn’t have language for the thing itself.
And, yes, inventing a word because the existing vocabulary inconvenienced me is a little ridiculous. I am comfortable with this. Writers have been mangling, combining, borrowing, and inventing language for as long as there have been writers. Shakespeare is famously associated with an enormous number of words whose earliest surviving appearances are in his work, even if scholars now argue about how many he actually invented.
So, I am claiming Shakespeare as precedent while very carefully not claiming Shakespeare as a peer.
I also cannot promise languorene will be the last word I make up.
Actually, I probably shouldn’t promise much of anything here.
English is enormous. Most of the time, somewhere inside it, the word I need is probably waiting.
But, if it isn’t?
Well.
Languorene.
Languore e
Beyond a real word
What is real?
