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The Trouble With Hollywood’s Gender Flips

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Back in the summer of 2016, when the female "Ghostbusters" remake hit theaters, aggrieved fans of the original regarded the new film as a politically motivated assassination. Replacing their childhood comedy idols with women was a kind of narrative murder, committed by a cabal of Hollywood moguls and humorless feminists. This summer's own splashy female reboot, "Ocean's 8," channels such histrionics with a deliciously literal twist. As the orange jumpsuited Debbie Ocean (Sandra Bullock) attempts to talk her way out of prison - a scene that mirrors the opening parole hearing of Danny Ocean (George Clooney) from the 2001 "Ocean's Eleven" - she reveals that Danny is her brother, and that he's dead.

Maybe. Now that every modern film franchise is destined for eternal reincarnation, no character is ever for-sure dead anymore. So as Debbie mounts her own fantastical heist - lifting $150 million worth of Cartier diamonds off a celebrity neck at the Met Gala - she keeps one eye on her brother's tomb, half-expecting him to crawl out. We spend the film anticipating his appearance, too. Even when Debbie is on screen, Danny is in the back of our minds. And even when a Hollywood franchise is retooled around women, it still revolves around men - the story lines they wrote, the characters they created, the worlds they built.

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In the two years since that "Ghostbusters," the gender-swapped remake has expanded from one-off stunt into full-blown genre. This summer produced three such films. Joining "Ocean's 8" is the Melissa McCarthy vehicle "Life of the Party," which cribs its premise from Rodney Dangerfield's 1986 comedy "Back to School" - a midlife crisis inspires a parent to join his or her kid at college and high jinks ensue. There's also "Overboard," with Anna Faris as the working-class single parent (played by Kurt Russell in the 1987 original) who exacts revenge on a wealthy playboy after he falls off his yacht and forgets who he is (Eugenio Derbez takes on the Goldie Hawn role).

More are on the way. A female-centric remake of "What Women Want," starring Taraji P. Henson, is coming in December. A "Dirty Rotten Scoundrels" redo, "The Hustle," with Anne Hathaway and Rebel Wilson tagging in for Michael Caine and Steve Martin, is slated for next summer. Gender-flipped adaptations of " Lord of the Flies," " Splash" and " What About Bob" are in various stages of development. Even KFC mascot Colonel Sanders has now been rebooted as a woman.

The gender-swapped comedy satisfies a couple of-the-moment entertainment industry imperatives: It allows Hollywood to reanimate lucrative old properties ("Ocean's Eleven" was, of course, itself a remake), while recasting them with diverse casts and woke politics. That's resulted in a boon of comedic parts for women, but they come with baggage. These reboots require women to relive men's stories instead of fashioning their own. And they're subtly expected to fix these old films, to neutralize their sexism and infuse them with feminism, to rebuild them into good movies with good politics, too. They have to do everything the men did, except backwards and with ideals.

Some of the rankest sexism of the past several decades of Hollywood comedy can indeed be slickly resolved with a gender swap. The very idea of writing over these movies with hot-pink graffiti supplies a thrill. The few roles for women in the originals were as love interests (Julia Roberts in "Ocean's" is the crown jewel in Danny's heist) or helpmates (Annie Potts as the "Ghostbusters" receptionist). But compared to the awkward white male geeks and leering white male boors that constituted underdogs in many of these films, women now fit more cleanly into the disadvantaged position, whether they're fighting for respect from the scientific establishment ("Ghostbusters"), seeking lost educational opportunities ("Life of the Party") or suffering under the conditions of low-wage work and single parenthood ("Overboard").

Even "Ocean's 8" conjures the current corporate-feminist imperative of women seizing capital, like a kind of equal-pay initiative for female thieves. Debbie pumps up her girl gang on the evening of the heist by telling them: "Somewhere out there, there's an 8-year-old girl lying in bed, dreaming of being a criminal. Let's do this for her."

Then there's the sex stuff. Eighties comedies routinely built bits around men harassing, stalking and sexually humiliating women. By giving women the sexual upper hand, these remakes neutralize the most offensive aspects of the originals. When Mr. Russell kidnaps an amnesiac Ms. Hawn and convinces her she is his wife in the 1987 "Overboard," he threatens her and amuses himself by gesturing at raping her. But in the remake, it's the playboy played by Mr. Derbez who attempts to initiate sex with a disinterested Ms. Faris, the woman who has tricked him into thinking he's her husband.

Similarly, when Mr. Dangerfield arrives on campus in "Back to School," he barrels into a sorority house, throws open a shower curtain and leers bug-eyed at a naked and screaming sorority girl. ("Take it easy, honey! I didn't see a thing!" he says as he whips the curtain closed, before opening it once more to add, "You're perfect!") Compare that with Ms. McCarthy's mid-divorce mom in "Life of the Party," who hits it off and gets it on with a college boy at a frat rager, breaking a taboo without actually becoming a creep. Because middle-aged moms are coded as sexless, Ms. McCarthy's character needs merely to nudge the sexual envelope in order for her antics to feel unruly.

And when the women of "Ghostbusters" gently sexually harass their ditsy hunk of a receptionist (Chris Hemsworth in glasses), it lacks the malicious edge of Bill Murray effectively stalking Sigourney Weaver under the guise of busting her ghost. Because real women are physically and socially vulnerable to men, granting sexual power to them on film feels harmless and a little cute.

One gets the sense that these movies aren't just fixing up old plots; they're working as symbolic correctives to Hollywood's mistreatment of women writ large. But the increased social acceptability often comes at the expense of the story. When the "Ghostbusters" scientists shamelessly hit on Mr. Hemsworth, it strains credulity. And when Anna Faris's single mom Kate hauls the womanizer who recently physically assaulted her into her home to live with her three girls, the choice feels actively insane.

Though these remakes are often referred to as "all female," they typically retain men in a key role: that of the antagonist. (Well, two: For some reason, men get to direct all of these movies, too.) The female Ghostbusters contend with male university and government officials, supernatural debunkers and an embittered occultist nerd who recalls the internet neckbeards who protested the film itself. The criminal crew in "Ocean's Eleven" set out to swindle casino mogul Terry Benedict (Andy Garcia), and "Ocean's 8" wraps its plot around a male mark, too: Claude Becker (Richard Armitage), the smugly slick art dealer who pulls Debbie into an art fraud scheme (and a relationship) and then turns on her. But while Benedict proves a formidable opponent, Becker is an underwritten egotist. That helps serve a female empowerment message, but not the plot. Late in the film, James Corden turns up to investigate Debbie and crew and all but walks away with the movie, revealing another ironic twist to the choice of a male rival - it robs an actress of what can be the reboot's juiciest role.

As much as these gender-swapped films free women from old Hollywood expectations, they box them into a new one: Their female protagonists must be admirable. No such requirement was placed on the characters of Mr. Dangerfield or Mr. Murray, who gained admiration from audiences through their thorough commitment to offending. For women, the demand often manifests itself as typically feminine behavior - acting nice, and looking it. In "Life of the Party," Ms. McCarthy gets a makeover; in "Ocean's 8," the female oddballs slip into gowns to strut down the steps of the Met. And of course, the women ought to be good to other women. Ms. McCarthy's female rivals in "Life of the Party" are cardboard-cutout mean girls easily converted into allies, and the rifts that emerge in Debbie Ocean's girl gang are effortlessly smoothed. Even the self-involved actress Daphne Kluger (Ms. Hathaway) is instantaneously redeemed midway through.

There is a slight moral miscalculation here: that in order for a film to be considered feminist, it has to show women fighting men, and not each other. But life pits women against one another, and eliding that is just as ridiculous as staging all intra-female conflicts in kiddie pools full of Jell-O - it ignores what women are actually like. One of the most intriguing facets of "Ocean's 8" is its implied bisexuality, and the hinted tension between Debbie and her partner in crime (if not more), Lou (Cate Blanchett). The subtext would have been more interesting as text; it would supply a true conflict and depth of character for the two stars and make the film feel truly transformative. But for all the female characters jammed into these films, they can shy away from revealing the complexity of female experiences.

It's hard not to watch these female ensembles and yearn for the heights of "Bridesmaids," or more recently, the coastal California social satire-murder mystery "Big Little Lies," both of which lean into conflict between women instead of shying away. These stories acknowledge that women have problems that originate within and between themselves, not just in their relationships with men. In short, they let women be interesting. And when their feuding crews of women do team up, it feels earned instead of assumed. (Both stories were also originated by women.) Besides, comedy requires the upending of social expectation, and the funniest parts of these projects are the moments when the characters wrestle free of feminine demands - not by "acting like men," but by acting out as women.

"Bridesmaids" was Ms. McCarthy's breakout film, and though she has since become a star, her subsequent roles have failed to match the unbridled inappropriateness she embodied through her bridesmaid, Megan - a woman who shows up to a ritzy engagement party in a golf cap, announces her intension to "climb" a male guest "like a tree" and proffers a "Fight Club" theme for the bachelorette party. Compare that to her "Life of the Party" character, who is well-meaning, universally loved and (naturally) less funny. When women are moved to the center of the frame, they're expected to act more womanly - even when they're playing roles originally occupied by men. It's interesting, and a little sad, that the highlight of Ms. McCarthy's recent career has involved her straight-up playing a male character, channeling the impotent rage of former press secretary Sean Spicer on "Saturday Night Live."

The meta conversation around these gender swaps has focused on the manboy backlash, but now a feminist resistance is brewing, too. When a female "Lord of the Flies" project was announced at Warner Bros., the writer Roxane Gay tweeted that it "makes no sense" as "the plot of that book wouldn't happen with all women." So far, many of these female reboots have drummed up female support that matches or exceeds the passion of their male detractors. It can feel as if it's a kind of feminist imperative to buy a ticket. But as the novelty fades, these movies will begin to be assessed not on their politics, but on their merits.

The men of "Oceans Eleven" got to do one thing the women of "Ocean's 8" do not: star in a good movie. The construction of Debbie's supposedly masterful heist is so sloppy that the one rule she sets for it - no men in her crew - is limply betrayed in the climax, when a male member of the franchise shimmies in to execute its most strenuous element. Upon second viewing, the '80s "Ghostbusters" and "Overboard" aren't lofty critical achievements, either, but at least they're originals, which gave them the room to become phenomena. Note to Hollywood: When women complained that they aren't afforded the same roles in Hollywood that men are, they weren't speaking literally.

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The Trouble With Hollywood's Gender Flips

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Back in the summer of 2016, when the female "Ghostbusters" remake hit theaters, aggrieved fans of the original regarded the new film as a politically motivated assassination. Replacing their childhood comedy idols with women was a kind of narrative murder, committed by a cabal of Hollywood moguls and humorless feminists.

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A white, wide-brimmed bonnet and a red cloak have come to mean one thing: women's oppression. Margaret Atwood's 1985 novel The Handmaid's Tale seared this image into our souls with its depiction of a near-future dystopia in which women are forced into reproductive slavery to bear the children of the elite - and wear this uniform to underline their subservience. For more than three decades, the image has shown up on the covers of the book around the world, on posters from the 1990 film, in ads for the 2017 TV series, and even on real women at demonstrations for reproductive rights.

Atwood even took newspaper clips to her interviews about the book to show her plot points' real-life inspirations

The handmaid we're presumably seeing in most of these images, though we often don't know for sure, is Offred, the tale's narrator. As a handmaid in the Republic of Gilead, she must routinely submit to ritualistic sex with her commander, Fred. (Her name derives from the term "of Fred.") She's one of the still-fertile women rounded up for the job of reproduction after many women in the ruling class were rendered infertile by environmental toxins. Before a coup toppled the US government to form the new theocratic state Gilead, she was married to a man named Luke and had a young daughter.

Atwood conceived the novel as 'speculative fiction,' a work that imagines a future that could conceivably happen without any advances in technology from the present. In other words, she said, "Science fiction has monsters and spaceships; speculative fiction could really happen." Every aspect of the book was inspired by social and political events of the early 1980s, when she wrote it.

Because of this, Atwood's novel has an eerie way of always feeling of the moment, as it turns out, from its first publication through every other iteration that has followed. When it debuted in 1985, Atwood even took newspaper clips to her interviews about the book to show her plot points' real-life antecedents. The book mirrored the United States' embrace of conservatism, as evidenced by the election of Ronald Reagan as president, as well as the increasing power of the Christian right and its powerful lobbying organisations the Moral Majority, Focus on the Family and the Christian Coalition - not to mention the rise of televangelism. The character of Serena Joy in The Handmaid's Tale is a former televangelist who articulates theocratic policy suggestions that have now forced her, like all women, into a life solely at home: Atwood writes of Serena Joy, "She doesn't make speeches anymore. She has become speechless. She stays in her home, but it doesn't seem to agree with her. How furious she must be, now that she's been taken at her word."

Atwood writes in The Handmaid's Tale that African-Americans have been resettled to "National Homelands" in the Midwest

Though Atwood is Canadian and writing about a later time - Joyce Carol Oates, writing in The New York Review of Books, speculated the book was set around 2005 - she has said the commentary was aimed squarely at the United States of the 1980s, including the rising political power of Christian fundamentalists, environmental concerns, and attacks on women's reproductive rights. The backlash against abortion in the US at the time included a widely distributed propaganda video called 'The Silent Scream,' a rash of abortion clinic bombings and arson cases and a proposed law that would give foetuses civil rights protections. The Reagan administration also broke with longstanding policy and declared that the US government would fund only international women's health groups that promoted 'natural' family planning - that is, abstinence - in underdeveloped countries. As English professor SC Neuman wrote in a 2006 paper published in the University of Toronto Quarterly, "Offred, in short, is a fictional product of 1970s feminism, and she finds herself in a situation that is a fictional realisation of the backlash against women's rights that gathered force during the early 1980s."

Not everyone in the US government at the time even opposed apartheid in South Africa: future vice president Dick Cheney was against the release of Nelson Mandela from prison, while Senator John McCain voted not to divest from the South African government. Recalling the Bantustans of apartheid-era South Africa, Atwood writes in The Handmaid's Tale that African-Americans have been resettled to "National Homelands" in the Midwest.
Puritanism and public policy
The Handmaid's Tale is always discussed as a feminist warning of sorts, and has also been interpreted as a commentary on sexism in the book of Genesis. But some of what Atwood describes wasn't merely speculation about the end result of the religious right taking power in the US but was based on what was happening elsewhere. Atwood says she was inspired in part by Nicolai Ceausescu's preoccupation with boosting female birth rates in Romania, which led to the policing of pregnant women and the banning of abortion and birth control, not to mention the murders of dissidents by the Ferdinand Marcos regime in the Philippines. The idea of 'giving' the offspring of lower classes to the ruling class came from Argentina, where a military junta seized power in 1976, subsequently 'disappearing' up to 500 children and placing them with selected leaders.

But American Puritanism is undoubtedly the central reference point in Atwood's text - and she drew connections between what was happening in the US in the 1980s and the original Puritan colonists in 17th Century New England. "Nations never build apparently radical forms of government on foundations that aren't there already," Atwood wrote in The Guardian in 2012. "Thus... the USSR replaced the dreaded imperial secret police with an even more dreaded secret police, and so forth. The deep foundation of the US - so went my thinking - was not the comparatively recent 18th-Century Enlightenment structures of the republic, with their talk of equality and their separation of church and state, but the heavy-handed theocracy of 17th-Century Puritan New England, with its marked bias against women, which would need only the opportunity of a period of social chaos to reassert itself." Reagan himself referred to his dream of the US being a 'shining city on a hill,' coopting the term the Puritans had for their Massachusetts Bay colony.
Forever relevant?
Atwood's book was a hit with critics and readers, but the film adaptation four years later was a dud. The production's own difficulties showed how relevant it was: most studios wouldn't consider putting out a movie that was so heavily female, and many major actresses were afraid of the radical material. The 1990 film version is a sometimes serious, sometimes sexed-up version that squandered the talents of stars Natasha Richardson and Faye Dunaway. German director Volker Schlöndorff envisioned it as a sexual thriller, an obvious misinterpretation of the original material. Richardson as Offred, was not only stripped of her agency - the script avoided voiceover, losing the urgency of the book - she seemed more objectified than ever. Reviews were mostly dismissive, and the film failed at the box office, too, making back only $5m of its $13m budget.

Since then, The Handmaid's Tale has inspired a number of lower-profile adaptations and related works. Stage adaptations have been produced in the United States at Tufts University and for a UK tour. An opera by Poul Ruders premiered in Copenhagen in 2000, and was performed by the English National Opera in London in 2003 and by the Canadian Opera Company in 2004-05. The Royal Winnipeg Ballet offered up its interpretation of the story in 2013.

It wasn't until last year, when The Handmaid's Tale premiered on Hulu as a television series adaptation, that the work got its pop cultural due. The show's producers changed details to bring the series into the present day, including modern touchstones like Uber, Tinder, cappuccinos, and Craigslist in flashbacks to Offred's pre-handmaid life. But the series felt all the more chilling because of the massive shift in US politics with the election of Donald Trump, who was inaugurated just three months before the series premiered. Suddenly, the book and series' major flashpoints felt more possible than ever: a government declaring martial law after an attack by Islamic extremists, a regime that systematically eliminates gay people, a society that prioritises procreation (and subjugation of women) above all else. "[H]ow eerily prescient that the Republic of Gilead was established by a coup when Christian fundamentalists, revulsed by an overly liberal, godless, and promiscuous society, assassinated the president, machine-gunned Congress, declared a national state of emergency, and laid blame to 'Islamic fanatics,'" Joyce Carol Oates wrote in a Handmaid retrospective in 2006. "As in Orwell's 1984, the Republic consolidates its strength by maintaining continual wars against demonised 'enemies.'"

This all dovetailed with fears of Trump's authoritarian tendencies and his vice president's anti-gay and anti-abortion beliefs. Handmaid costumes even became common at protests of laws intended to limit women's reproductive freedom. The Women's March inspired by Trump's inauguration mirrored the TV series' flashback scenes of women in the streets protesting the stripping of their rights.

As The Handmaid's Tale returns for its second season, it feels more vital than ever, even though the cultural landscape has once again shifted in a major way for women. Since the last series, the #metoo movement has taken hold, and Offred's story is shifting with it. Without giving too much away about the second-season premiere, which goes, in some fashion, beyond the narrative in Atwood's novel, Offred is now finding methods to take back her own power in the oppressive regime and seizing those moments in satisfying ways - not unlike women finding power in telling their own stories via #metoo and #timesup. Of course, this isn't a coincidence; the producers of The Handmaid's Tale series were aware of the changing women's movement as they constructed this season.

Since the book's release, The Handmaid's Tale's most quoted phrase has been the one scratched, presumably by Offred's handmaid predecessor, in the wall of her room's cupboard: Nolite te bastardes carborundorum. Don't let the bastards grind you down. It has become such a feminist rallying cry that many women have the phrase tattooed on their bodies. "Revellers dress up as Handmaids on Hallowe'en and also for protest marches - these two uses of its costumes mirroring its doubleness," Atwood wrote for the Guardian. "Is it entertainment or dire political prophecy? Can it be both? I did not anticipate any of this when I was writing the book."

The Handmaid's Tale's messages and iconography feel more applicable than ever today. But we always seem to be saying that about Atwood's story. Will we be doing the same if yet another adaptation appears, three decades from now?
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Why The Handmaid's Tale is so relevant today

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A white, wide-brimmed bonnet and a red cloak have come to mean one thing: women's oppression. Margaret Atwood's 1985 novel The Handmaid's Tale seared this image into our souls with its depiction of a near-future dystopia in which women are forced into reproductive slavery to bear the children of the elite - and wear this uniform to underline their subservience.

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Jhumpa Lahiri

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LET'S MOVE IN a different direction and speak of the naked book.

I did not own many books as a girl. I would go to the library, where books were often undressed: without jackets or any images. I would find only hardcovers, and the pages that they contained.

I am the daughter of a librarian, and I too worked for many years in the public library where I grew up, from which I used to borrow books. I know that it is costly, also challenging, to protect the covers of volumes that will be read repeatedly by many. Book jackets are easily damaged and, even though there are ways to protect them-with plastic covers, for example- it is always easier to strip them. Hardcovers are made specifically to live in a library, while paperback pocket editions are more temporary.

I have read hundreds of books, almost all the literature of my schooling, without a summary blurb on the flap, without an author photograph. They had an anonymous quality, secretive. They gave nothing away in advance. To understand them, you had to read them.

The authors I loved at the time were embodied only by their words. The naked cover doesn't interfere. My first reading happened outside of time, ignorant of the market, of current events. The part of me that regards book jackets with suspicion seeks to rediscover that experience.

When I purchase a book today, I acquire a range of other things: a picture of the author, biographical information, reviews. All of this complicates matters. It causes confusion. It distracts me. I hate reading the comments on the cover; it is to them that we owe one of the most repugnant words in the English language: blurb. Personally, I think it deplorable to place the words and opinions of others on the book jacket. I want the first words read by the reader of my book to be written by me.

I hate reading the comments on the cover; it is to them that we owe one of the most repugnant words in the English language: Blurb

Today the relationship between reader and book is far more mediated, with a dozen people buzzing around. We are never alone together, the text and I. I miss the silence, the mystery of the naked book: solitary, without support. It allows one to read in freedom, without previews or introductions. I believe that a naked book, too, can stand on its own feet.

Unfortunately it can't be sold that way. Almost no one wants to buy something unknown, not even a book, without prior information. In some ways today's reader resembles a tourist who, thanks to the guidebooks-this is, thanks to the impact of the book jacket-begins to inform and orient himself before disembarking in an unknown place. Before discovering it, before being there. Before reading.

The bound galleys of my first book published in the United States resembled a naked book to some degree. No image, just essential information. There was something generic rather than individual about them. In the past, when I would go on tour to promote a book, I would read from the bound galleys. When I was forced to use a copy of the actual book, I would remove the jacket. As I have said, the dressed book no longer belongs to me.

Sixteen years ago in America, when my first collection of stories was about to be released, critics and bookstore owners received imageless bound galleys. Why? Perhaps because even the publishing house, at the time, wanted the advance copies to be pristine, without added distractions or noise, hence without a jacket. This seems right.

These days, unfortunately, even the bound galleys contain what to me is superfluous information. The galleys of my last novel list the size of the printing run, my previous prizes and honors, and the titles of my other books. No matter how "essential" it appears, the packaging seems rigged somehow. I thought that the final cover was not there, but leafing through the galley, I came across a reproduction of it on the first page, followed by the flap copy. It was all there, just slightly hidden. There is no escape. For me, there are no more naked books.

( Excerpted from The Clothing of Books by Jhumpa Lahiri (Hamish Hamilton; Rs 199; Pages 71)

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LET'S MOVE IN a different direction and speak of the naked book. I did not own many books as a girl. I would go to the library, where books were often undressed: without jackets or any images. I would find only hardcovers, and the pages that they contained.

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Looked at this Air Canada safety video quickly with my classes this week for Part II, focussing on the following media literacy questions:
1. Who created this message?
2. What techniques are used to attract my attention?
3. How might different people understand this message differently from me? (Korean students were shocked by the subtle inclusion of a same-sex couple.)
4. What lifestyles, values, and points of view are represented in or omitted from this message? (Notice the omission of Native Canadians; notice that only White Canadians are seated in business class).
5. Why was this message sent?

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Air Canada Boeing 787 In-flight Safety Video

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John Koenig

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The Book - Coming Soon from Simon & Schuster! We don't have a release date yet, but I'll update this page as soon as I know. In the meantime, feel free to write me directly and describe an emotion you...

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Emotions, language & context

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We experience powerful emotions all of the time, but what are they? Where do they come from? This hour, TED speakers invoke history, language, science and music to help us think about the way we feel.

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Part 1 of the TED Radio Hour episode Decoding Our Emotions.
About John Koenig's TED Talk
When we can't describe how we're feeling, we say we "have no words." But in his made-up dictionary, writer John Koenig has invented words to describe our most abstract and ephemeral emotions.
About John Koenig
John Koenig is the founder and author of an online dictionary of made-up words called The Dictionary Of Obscure Sorrows, which is also a YouTube series. His dictionary aims to fill the gaps in the English language with terms to describe new emotions. He is currently working on a print version.

Koenig attended Macalester College in his home state of Minnesota. He currently lives in Amsterdam with his wife.

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John Koenig: What If There Were A Word For Every Emotion In The World?

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Part 1 of the TED Radio Hour episode Decoding Our Emotions. About John Koenig's TED Talk When we can't describe how we're feeling, we say we "have no words." But in his made-up dictionary, writer John Koenig has invented words to describe our most abstract and ephemeral emotions.

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How language changes over time

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For the best experience, please turn JavaScript on. Here's how

Language isn't set in stone. It changes all the time - and in turn, our language changes us. These talks explore how new words come to be.

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7 TED Talks on how language changes over time

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You have JavaScript disabled For the best experience, please turn JavaScript on. Here's how Language isn't set in stone. It changes all the time - and in turn, our language changes us. These talks explore how new words come to be.

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Maybe a Friday thing for Language - language is ever changing

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words feeling education beautiful knowledge "human experience" culture discovery learning etymology testtube language linguistics art expression "dictionary of obscure sorrows"

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A compendium of invented words written by John Koenig, that aims to fill holes in the language-to give a name to emotions we all feel but don't have a word for. The author's mission is to capture the aches, demons, vibes, joys and urges that roam the wilderness of the psychological interior.