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The votes are in, and the best country in the world is...

(Drum roll, please.)

It's Germany. The United States came fourth, right behind third-ranked Britain and second-ranked Canada.

That's according to the inaugural "Best Countries" ranking from US News & World Report, the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School and global brand consultants BAV Consulting. The ranking was officially unveiled at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, on 20 January.

"Just as we have done with universities, hospitals and other institutions, our Best Countries portal will be a global homepage for stories and data to help citizens, business leaders and governments evaluate performance in a rapidly changing world," Mortimer B. Zuckerman, chairman and editor-in-chief of U.S. News, said in a statement. The publication is known the world over for many of its rankings.

The new project ranks 60 countries across 24 categories and is based on a survey of more than 16,000 people.

The United States ranked first in power and influence. Sweden scored the most top spots, ranking first for being the best country for citizenship, raising kids and green living. Other top rankings include Brazil for adventure; Luxembourg for opening a business; France for cultural influence; Germany for entrepreneurship; Canada for quality of life; Italy for heritage; and India for its up-and-coming economy. In the end, Germany scored highest overall.

The ranking relied on surveys from 16,248 people from 36 countries in the Americas, Asia, Europe and Africa. Of those, more than 8,000 were "informed elites" (college-educated, middle- or upper-class individuals). More than 4,500 were business leaders, defined as senior leaders in an organization or individuals who own small business that employ others. The rest belonged to the general public.

Each respondent was asked to share his or her perceptions on a random selection of 65 attributes for a random selection of countries. The attributes were each scored and grouped into nine broader categories: adventure, citizenship, cultural influence, entrepreneurship, heritage, movers, open for business, power and quality of life.

Scores in each category were then weighted based on correlation with widespread prosperity, measured using the International Monetary Fund's 2014 per capita gross domestic product purchasing power parity.

The 60 countries included were chosen based on other key business, economy and quality of life indicators.
Copyright: Washington Post
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The world's best countries have been ranked... and No 1 is no surprise

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The votes are in, and the best country in the world is... (Drum roll, please.) It's Germany. The United States came fourth, right behind third-ranked Britain and second-ranked Canada. That's according to the inaugural "Best Countries" ranking from US News & World Report, the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School and global brand consultants BAV Consulting.

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A majority of EU countries voted on Monday against allowing two new genetically modified crops to be grown in Europe, batting the contentious decision on cultivation of Genetically Modified Organisms (GMO) in Europe back to the EU executive.

EU governments were asked to vote on the future of two grades of GM maize, Pioneer's 1507 and Syngenta's Bt11, which kill insects by producing their own pesticide and are also resistant to a particular herbicide. However, the votes against were not decisive in blocking their introduction because the opposition did not represent a "qualified majority" - also including countries that make up at least 65 percent of the EU population.

The governments were also asked to determine whether to extend authorisation for Monsanto's MON810, an insect-resistant maize that is grown mainly in Spain, but banned in a number of other countries.

More countries voted against than in favor, but again the vote was not considered decisive. The European Commission said the outcome counted as a "no opinion", meaning it would have to step in to take the decisions for GMOs that had received favourable opinions from the European Food Safety Authority.

It added that 17 EU countries had used an opt-out clause, with a further two for part of their territories. "In practice this means that the three GMOs, if and once authorised at EU level, will not in any case be cultivated on the territories benefiting from the opt out," Commission spokesman Enrico Brivio said.
Criticism from politicians and activists
The German federal government's decision to abstain from voting sparked criticism in Germany. "Its repeated abstention means passing the buck," said Green Party politician and member of German parliament Harald Ebner. He demanded a EU-wide ban of genetically modified corn instead of a "European rag rug".

Genetically modified rice in a laboratory

Mute Schimpf, food campaigner for Friends of the Earth Europe, said the decision now rested with European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker.

"He can put himself on the side of the majority of countries, citizens and farmers who do not want genetically modified crops, or he can back the mega-corporations behind the industrialisation of our countryside," she said.

At the end of last year, 55 GM crops were approved for import as feed and food into Europe. While approved for human consumption, in practice the crops are used as animal feed. Repeated EU scientific assessments have concluded that GMO crops are as safe for humans and the environment as their conventional counterparts, but consumer opposition to the technology in Europe remains strong.

"A majority of governments, parliamentarians and Europeans oppose GM crops," said Greenpeace EU food policy director Franziska Achterberg. "Instead of backing risky products peddled by multinational corporations, the Commission should support ecological farming and the solutions it provides for rural areas, farmers and the environment."

MON810 is the only GM crop grown in Europe. A potato developed by BASF was granted approval in 2010, but the German company withdrew it in 2012.

bb/bea (Reuters, AFP, Greenpeace)

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EU nations vote against GM crops | DW | 27.03.2017

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A majority of EU countries voted on Monday against allowing two new genetically modified crops to be grown in Europe, batting the contentious decision on cultivation of Genetically Modified Organisms (GMO) in Europe back to the EU executive.

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It could become one of the most important legal battles in music - Sir Paul McCartney is suing Sony over control of The Beatles' back catalogue.

The star has gone to a US court, seeking to regain the publishing rights to 267 of the band's classic songs.

He's been trying to get them back since the 1980s, when Michael Jackson famously out-bid him for the rights.

Jackson's debt-ridden estate sold the songs to Sony last year, along with others including New York, New York.

Sir Paul's legal case, filed in a Manhattan court on Wednesday, is over what is known as copyright termination - the right of authors to reclaim ownership of their works from music publishers after a specific length of time has passed.

It was part of the US 1976 Copyright Act and, in recent years, performers like Prince, Billy Joel and Blondie have used it to regain control of their work.

However, Duran Duran recently lost a similar case - when the British High Court ruled that the contracts they signed in the UK took precedence over their rights in the US.

Under UK law, music publishing companies can control the copyright until 70 years after the artist's death.

Sir Paul is worried that Sony/ATV Music Publishing will use Duran Duran's loss to challenge his attempts to obtain The Beatles' back catalogue.

With his legal action, Sir Paul is trying to ensure Sony does not stand in his way by accusing him of a breach of contract or publishing agreement.

"Rather than provide clear assurances to Paul McCartney that defendants will not challenge his exercise of his termination rights, defendants are clearly reserving their rights pending the final outcome of the Duran Duran litigation," said the legal papers filed on his behalf.

The papers state that Sir Paul wants "quiet, unclouded title to his rights". Sony/ATV said it was "disappointed" by the lawsuit, calling it "both unnecessary and premature".

Unlike Duran Duran, Sir Paul has filed his legal case in America, and the verdict could have major ramifications for other British artists.

'Highest respect'

Songs in the Lennon-McCartney catalogue, composed between September 1962 and June 1971, become eligible for copyright termination in the US after 56 years.

The first will be Love Me Do, which could revert to Sir Paul in 2018 - but others, including Come Together and Get Back, are not due to become available until 2025.

The star started sending notices to Sony/ATV in 2008, stating his desire to reclaim the copyright, the legal papers said.

His lawyers have repeatedly asked Sony/ATV to acknowledge his rights to terminate copyright - but the company has declined to do so, it continued.

He is seeking a declaration from the court that he can reclaim his songs, as well as legal fees.

In a statement, the music publisher said it had "the highest respect for Sir Paul McCartney with whom we have enjoyed a long and mutually rewarding relationship with respect to the treasured Lennon and McCartney song catalogue".

It added: "We have collaborated closely with both Sir Paul and the late John Lennon's Estate for decades to protect, preserve and promote the catalogue's long-term value."

Lennon's share in The Beatles' songs will not return to his estate because Yoko Ono sold the rights to his music to Sony/ATV Music in 2009, with those rights lasting the entire copyright's lifetime (70 years).
Follow us on Facebook, on Twitter @BBCNewsEnts, or on Instagram at bbcnewsents. If you have a story suggestion email entertainment.news@bbc.co.uk .

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Sir Paul McCartney sues Sony over Beatles songs - BBC News

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It could become one of the most important legal battles in music - Sir Paul McCartney is suing Sony over control of The Beatles' back catalogue. The star has gone to a US court, seeking to regain the publishing rights to 267 of the band's classic songs.

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Mahatma Gandhi was assassinated on this day 69 years ago but his ideas of Hindu-Muslim unity still haunt India's Hindu hardliners, writes BBC Hindi's Rajesh Joshi.

The discomfort of the Hindu hardline right with Mahatma Gandhi became apparent once again when a senior leader of the governing Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) recently described Prime Minister Narendra Modi as a "bigger brand name" than the iconic leader of India's freedom struggle.

Anil Vij, a senior minister in the BJP government in the northern state of Haryana, also said that Gandhi's picture would eventually be phased out of the currency notes.

His comments came soon after a government department replaced Gandhi's pictures on its calendars and diaries with Mr Modi's. Critics perceived it as a move to slowly replace Gandhi with the prime minister.

The irony was not lost on anyone because the government department in question is responsible for popularising handmade cotton yarn or khadi - one of Gandhi's pet themes during India's freedom struggle.

As the controversy erupted and social media started buzzing with unfavourable comments, the BJP distanced itself from Mr Vij's anti-Gandhi statement.

'Good intentions'

The controversy died down after he agreed to retract his statement in the face of growing outrage.

But this was not the first time that a BJP politician has made anti-Gandhi remarks. Past examples show that many right-wing Hindu leaders never mince words when it comes to criticising Gandhi.

In recent times Sakshi Maharaj, a BJP MP from the northern state of Uttar Pradesh, described Gandhi's assassin Nathuram Godse as a "patriot". Godse's association with the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) - which has umbilical ties to the BJP - has been well documented.
The Hindu hardliners who see Modi as their own Inside a far-right Hindu 'self defence' camp
Way back in 1998, then RSS chief Prof Rajendra Singh praised Godse for his commitment to the concept of Akhand Bharat - a unified India which includes Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and even Myanmar (Burma).

"His intentions were good but he used wrong methods," Mr Singh said.

The biggest issue the RSS has with Gandhi is that he advocated Hindu-Muslim unity while proclaiming himself to be a devout Hindu. The cornerstone of its worldview is Hindu supremacy.

Madhav Sadashiva Golwalkar, one of the founding fathers of the Sangh, described Muslims and Christians, along with the Communists, as an "internal threat to the nation".

Historian and author Ramchandra Guha puts the Hindu right-wing dilemma about Gandhi into perspective. "The RSS was deeply influenced by two Hindu thinkers - Vinayak Damodar Savarkar and Madhav Sadashiva Golwalkar - and both of them deeply detested Gandhi."

In fact, Savarkar was made an accused in the Gandhi murder case - though eventually he was exonerated of all charges.

"His rivalry with Gandhi went back to 1909 when he openly abused Gandhi. While Savarkar believed in violent methods, Gandhi was a pacifist," Mr Guha told the BBC.

"It was much later when the RSS decided to expand into the political arena, that they started saying nice things about Gandhi and included him in their list of 'revered' leaders," he added.

But there is another, probably more serious, reason for their hatred of Gandhi.

Ten days before Godse killed Gandhi, a young Hindu refugee man from Pakistan, Madanlal Pahwa, exploded a bomb on 20 January, 1948, at Delhi's Birla Bhawan where Gandhi was participating in his routine evening prayer.

Delhi and many parts of north India were in the grip of Hindu-Muslim violence after the partition of India and Pakistan. A day after Pahwa exploded the bomb, Gandhi described him as a "mere tool" in the hands of Hindu fanatics.

He directly challenged the forces of Hindu hardliners saying, "Don't do this. The Hindu religion is not going to be saved by such acts. I insist that if the Hindu religion is to be saved, it can be saved only through the kind of work I am doing."

No wonder that Praveen Togadia, an important leader of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP), an affiliated organisation of the RSS, declared during the height of anti-Muslim riots in Gujarat in 2002 that "terrorism came because Gandhi's ideology is being followed in this country".

Mr Togadia, like Mr Modi and Mr Vij, also learnt his politics in the shakhas - the morning military-style drills - of the RSS.

The only difference is that mainstream BJP leaders, especially those holding constitutional posts, avoid openly criticising Gandhi because of a variety of reasons: the compulsions of electoral politics, Gandhi's international stature and his place in the hearts of the Indian people as the "father of the nation".

Still, even though it has been nearly seven decades since Gandhi was assassinated, Hindu right-wing forces feel compelled to question his authority and challenge his idea of Hindu-Muslim unity.

And leaders like Sakshi Maharaj, Anil Vij and Praveen Togadia continue to eagerly oblige.

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Why India's Hindu hardliners want to sideline Mahatma Gandhi - BBC News

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Mahatma Gandhi was assassinated on this day 69 years ago but his ideas of Hindu-Muslim unity still haunt India's Hindu hardliners, writes BBC Hindi's Rajesh Joshi. The discomfort of the Hindu hardline right with Mahatma Gandhi became apparent once again when a senior leader of the governing Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) recently described Prime Minister Narendra Modi as a "bigger brand name" than the iconic leader of India's freedom struggle.

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Reading George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four again, now, hurts. And I'm not the only one to be revisiting it: sales of the book have soared in the past week. What you had previously thought you read at a cool, intellectual distance (a great book about "over there", somewhere in the past or future) now feels intimate, bitter and shocking. Orwell is writing of now when he writes, "Every year fewer and fewer words, and the range of consciousness always a little smaller."

Reading George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four again, now, hurts. And I'm not the only one to be revisiting it: sales of the book have soared in the past week. What you had previously thought you read at a cool, intellectual distance (a great book about "over there", somewhere in the past or future) now feels intimate, bitter and shocking. Orwell is writing of now when he writes, "Every year fewer and fewer words, and the range of consciousness always a little smaller."

Of course, we all have to keep our heads (especially we have to keep our heads). The lies about the crowd size at Donald Trump's inauguration by the hapless White House spokesman Sean Spicer at his first briefing were not earth-shattering. But any lie from this podium is deeply unsettling. Any hopes that Trump or his team were, underneath it all, "normal" rightwingers, have dissipated.

The post-truth era certainly shares aspects of the dystopian world of Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four. Michael Gove's infamous comment that Britain has had enough of experts is just one step away from 2+2 = 5. In the interrogation scene in 1984 this is the most appalling moment: before now we read it as a ludicrous indictment of the rejection of reality (surely, we conclude, the party itself must know that 2+2 = 4; science, machines all depend on it). In Nineteen Eighty-Four, the elite, personified by O'Brien, foster and control this willingness to believe one thing one day, and one thing another. Now, it seems, the party itself may believe the lie. As Orwell writes: "Science, in the old sense, had almost ceased to exist. In Newspeak there is no word for science."

Then there is privacy - Orwell puts the diary and the private self at the heart of his writing. In 1984, keeping a diary is Winston's first act of transgression. Orwell knew that authoritarian regimes want the heart and soul of people. His two-way telescreens predict social media. And we have, perhaps unwittingly, wandered into a world where feelings have never been more easily swayed: Trump summons them up personally and directly. In the book, Winston is suddenly struck that his mother's death, "had been tragic and sorrowful in a way that was no longer possible ... She had sacrificed herself to a conception of loyalty that was private and unalterable." It could no longer happen because "there were fear, hatred and pain but no dignity of emotion, no deep or complex sorrows".

But this new world has been a while coming. Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway's "alternative facts" were foreshadowed by the George W Bush adviser who said in 2002 that the new American empire was "creating [its] own reality". As in the 1930s, war has been at the heart of the corrosion of trust in politicians. The lies over Iraq and the quagmire of Afghanistan were followed by the financial crash of 2008, and bankers' bonuses - making people far more willing to disbelieve the remote metropolitan media and be drawn to the false dawn promised by Trump.

Yet these are the obvious big lies. There has been a long drift away from rational beliefs that we have watched too passively. Mistrust in facts was sown by the insistence on creationism and climate change denial by politicians and in many US churches. But it's not just America - in India, government officials say that cows don't contribute to global warming because they breathe out oxygen. Even universities with their "no platforms" have added yeast to the brew.

Trump is not O'Brien. He is more like a cut-price version of Big Brother himself. Instead of the elite of Nineteen Eighty-Four, who keep Big Brother's identity a mystery while they keep total control, this Big Brother, with his direct Twitter relationship with his followers, is fully on show. And as Orwell foresaw, his slogan could be "Ignorance is strength".

Tim Crook: Trump takes doublethink to a new extreme

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'I imagine Trump would amuse and horrify him at the same time.' Photograph: UPI / Barcroft Images

Trump's first few days of office have been such an explosion of propagandist grapeshot, it's little wonder many people have been reaching for copies of Nineteen Eighty-Four. His seminal essay Politics and the English Language should also go on the emergency reading list.

Orwell said political language can be "designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind". Washington Post media columnist Margaret Sullivan wrote that this week's reference by Trump spokesperson Kellyanne Conway to "alternative facts" means we have "come full Orwell". But have we?

Orwell certainly would have appreciated how the eruption of populist demagoguery and the Brexit and Trump triumphs have generated a "post-truth" anxiety in the mainstream media. Journalism's key institutions sense a crisis. Public sphere news and current affairs interpretation is supposed to represent reality to the audience. Orwell said that "realism" used to be called dishonesty, and wrote in his account of the Spanish civil war, Homage to Catalonia, that bombs are impartial because they killed the man they were thrown at, and the man who threw them.

Orwell never set foot in America. But he was an avid critic of its literature and politics, and would have conceded that his attitude to the USA had elements of the very doublethink he dramatised in Nineteen Eighty-Four. While he resented how post-second world war US economic dominance frustrated the realisation of the British socialist dream, he chose the American side against the Soviet Union in the cold war.

After his death, his crystal-pane deconstruction of the corruption of revolution and the totalitarian game were adopted as propagandist weapons by the CIA against the Soviet Union. The early transfer of Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four to film was even financed by the CIA with the endings changed.

But Trump takes doublethink to a new extreme, and if Orwell were alive today, I imagine Trump would amuse and horrify him at the same time. The key message in Nineteen Eighty-Four is that the purpose of propaganda is to narrow and limit human consciousness, confuse human conscience, and control and narrow the range of thinking. As all students of Orwellian literature will recall, Squealer, the propagandist porker in Animal Farm, can "turn black into white" and is expert in "new belief".

If any Orwellian unmasking of Trump rhetoric begins to hurt him, I imagine the day will come when the president gestures with his characteristic shape-and-pinch hand movement and bellows, "Fake Orwell".

DJ Taylor: The parallels are impossible to deny

It is just possible to feel a shred of sympathy with Kellyanne Conway. Stung by incontrovertible evidence that more people were keener on complaining about her boss than supporting him, took refuge in a form of words that would have been hilarious were they not at the same time horribly sinister. But it would be wrong to judge her too harshly for her defence of Sean Spicer's "alternative facts". She is a PR, operating in a world where all values are expedient.

It's useless to pretend that this isn't all sharply reminiscent of the world of Nineteen Eighty-Four (by coincidence, Orwell died 67 years ago to the day that the anti-Trumpites marched on Washington). Winston Smith, sitting in his cubby-hole at the Ministry of Truth falsifying back-numbers of the Times in accordance with the latest revisionist diktats from on high, deals in "alternative facts", or rather with deliberate untruths that eventually become facts merely because the former versions of them are no longer around to disturb.

The same goes for the periodic "readjustments" (ie reductions) of the amount of rationed goods available to the cowed citizenry of Orwell's Oceania. There, the impact of cuts can always be reduced by altering the words of the previous announcement.

Inevitably, much of this manipulation can be traced back to Orwell's monitoring of the concealments and evasions of the second world war - the Katyn massacre, for example, when thousands of Poles were murdered by Soviet secret police and which some Russian history books omit altogether - but its roots lie in his experience of fighting against Franco in the Spanish civil war. It was here, he later wrote, that he first read newspaper accounts of battles that had not taken place and heard reports of soldiers charged with cowardice whom he knew had fought bravely.

None of which should obscure the fact that this defender of objective truth was also a propagandist (working for the BBC's Eastern Service in the early 1940s, Orwell once complained that the fault of the government's war-time propaganda was that it needed to do its job more effectively.) At the same time, he was confident that there were lines which neither right nor left in western democracies would cross. The Daily Telegraph, for instance, features near the top of a list he once compiled of newspapers which were reliable. He might not have agreed with the way it interpreted the news, but he believed the information it contained was accurate.

As for what Orwell might have thought of President Trump and his entourage, he would probably have drawn attention to the steady war of attrition fought by various political and corporate oligarchies over the past 50 years against the idea that it can be said that a particular event definitely happened, whether you approve of it or not. He might have pointed out, too, that these obfuscations are not merely a byproduct of total war - who could really complain about the RAF rigging the numbers of Nazi planes brought down in the Battle of Britain? - but part and parcel of the way in which a certain kind of contemporary autocrat and reality-twister faces up to the world.

Meanwhile, it is worth asking what the average person is supposed to do in a landscape where the leader of what used to be called the free world has such a wanton disregard for one of the principal tools of freedom. Even Big Brother, after all, brought a certain amount of guile to pretending what he said was true.

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Welcome to dystopia - George Orwell experts on Donald Trump | The panel

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Reading George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four again, now, hurts. And I'm not the only one to be revisiting it: sales of the book have soared in the past week. What you had previously thought you read at a cool, intellectual distance (a great book about "over there", somewhere in the past or future) now feels intimate, bitter and shocking.

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Have you ever felt a little mbuki-mvuki - the irresistible urge to "shuck off your clothes as you dance"? Perhaps a little kilig - the jittery fluttering feeling as you talk to someone you fancy? How about uitwaaien - which encapsulates the revitalising effects of taking a walk in the wind?

These words - taken from Bantu, Tagalog, and Dutch - have no direct English equivalent, but they represent very precise emotional experiences that are neglected in our language. And if Tim Lomas at the University of East London has his way, they might soon become much more familiar.

Lomas's Positive Lexicography Project aims to capture the many flavours of good feelings (some of which are distinctly bittersweet) found across the world, in the hope that we might start to incorporate them all into our daily lives. We have already borrowed many emotion words from other languages, after all - think "frisson", from French, or "schadenfreude", from German - but there are many more that have not yet wormed their way into our vocabulary. Lomas has found hundreds of these "untranslatable" experiences so far - and he's only just begun.

Learning these words, he hopes, will offer us all a richer and more nuanced understanding of ourselves. "They offer a very different way of seeing the world."

Lomas says he was first inspired after hearing a talk on the Finnish concept of sisu, which is a sort of "extraordinary determination in the face of adversity". According to Finnish speakers, the English ideas of "grit", "perseverance" or "resilience" do not come close to describing the inner strength encapsulated in their native term. It was "untranslatable" in the sense that there was no direct or easy equivalent encoded within the English vocabulary that could capture that deep resonance.

Intrigued, he began to hunt for further examples, scouring the academic literature and asking every foreign acquaintance for their own suggestions. The first results of this project were published in the Journal of Positive Psychology last year.

Many of the terms referred to highly specific positive feelings, which often depend on very particular circumstances:

Desbundar (Portuguese) - to shed one's inhibitions in having fun

Tarab (Arabic) - a musically induced state of ecstasy or enchantment

Shinrin-yoku (Japanese) - the relaxation gained from bathing in the forest, figuratively or literally

Gigil (Tagalog) - the irresistible urge to pinch or squeeze someone because they are loved or cherished

Yuan bei (Chinese) - a sense of complete and perfect accomplishment

Iktsuarpok (Inuit) - the anticipation one feels when waiting for someone, whereby one keeps going outside to check if they have arrived

But others represented more complex and bittersweet experiences, which could be crucial to our growth and overall flourishing.

Natsukashii (Japanese) - a nostalgic longing for the past, with happiness for the fond memory, yet sadness that it is no longer

Wabi-sabi (Japanese) - a "dark, desolate sublimity" centred on transience and imperfection in beauty

Saudade (Portuguese) - a melancholic longing or nostalgia for a person, place or thing that is far away either spatially or in time - a vague, dreaming wistfulness for phenomena that may not even exist

Sehnsucht (German) - "life-longings", an intense desire for alternative states and realisations of life, even if they are unattainable

In addition to these emotions, Lomas's lexicography also charted the personal characteristics and behaviours that might determine our long-term well-being and the ways we interact with other people.

Dadirri (Australian aboriginal) term - a deep, spiritual act of reflective and respectful listening

Pihentagyú (Hungarian) - literally meaning "with a relaxed brain", it describes quick-witted people who can come up with sophisticated jokes or solutions

Desenrascanço (Portuguese) - to artfully disentangle oneself from a troublesome situation

Sukha (Sanskrit) - genuine lasting happiness independent of circumstances

Orenda (Huron) - the power of the human will to change the world in the face of powerful forces such as fate

You can view many more examples on his website, where there is also the opportunity to submit your own. Lomas readily admits that many of the descriptions he has offered so far are only an approximation of the term's true meaning. "The whole project is a work in progress, and I'm continually aiming to refine the definitions of the words in the list," he says. "I definitely welcome people's feedback and suggestions in that regard."

In the future, Lomas hopes that other psychologists may begin to explore the causes and consequences of these experiences - to extend our understanding of emotion beyond the English concepts that have dominated research so far.

But studying these terms will not just be of scientific interest; Lomas suspects that familiarising ourselves with the words might actually change the way we feel ourselves, by drawing our attention to fleeting sensations we had long ignored.

"In our stream of consciousness - that wash of different sensations feelings and emotions - there's so much to process that a lot passes us by," Lomas says. "The feelings we have learned to recognise and label are the ones we notice - but there's a lot more that we may not be aware of. And so I think if we are given these new words, they can help us articulate whole areas of experience we've only dimly noticed."

As evidence, Lomas points to the work of Lisa Feldman Barrett at Northeastern University, who has shown that our abilities to identify and label our emotions can have far-reaching effects.

Her research was inspired by the observation that certain people use different emotion words interchangeably, while others are highly precise in their descriptions. "Some people use words like anxious, afraid, angry, disgusted to refer to a general affective state of feeling bad," she explains. "For them, they are synonyms, whereas for other people they are distinctive feelings with distinctive actions associated with them."

This is called "emotion granularity" and she usually measures this by asking the participants to rate their feelings on each day over the period of a few weeks, before she calculates the variation and nuances within their reports: whether the same old terms always coincide, for instance.

Importantly, she has found that this then determines how well we cope with life. If you are better able to pin down whether you are feeling despair or anxiety, for instance, you might be better able to decide how to remedy those feelings: whether to talk to a friend, or watch a funny film. Or being able to identify your hope in the face of disappointment might help you to look for new solutions to your problem.

In this way, emotion vocabulary is a bit like a directory, allowing you to call up a greater number of strategies to cope with life. Sure enough, people who score highly on emotion granularity are better able to recover more quickly from stress and are less likely to drink alcohol as a way of recovering from bad news. It can even improve your academic success. Marc Brackett at Yale University has found that teaching 10 and 11-year-old children a richer emotional vocabulary improved their end-of-year grades, and promoted better behaviour in the classroom. "The more granular our experience of emotion is, the more capable we are to make sense of our inner lives," he says.

Both Brackett and Barrett agree that Lomas's "positive lexicography" could be a good prompt to start identifying the subtler contours of our emotional landscape. "I think it is useful - you can think of the words and the concepts they are associated with as tools for living," says Barrett. They might even inspire us to try new experiences, or appreciate old ones in a new light.

It's a direction of research that Lomas would like to explore in the future. In the meantime, Lomas is still continuing to build his lexicography - which has grown to nearly a thousand terms. Of all the words he has found so far, Lomas says that he most often finds himself pondering Japanese concepts such as wabi-sabi ( that "dark, desolate sublimity" involving transience and imperfection). "It speaks to this idea of finding beauty in phenomena that are aged and imperfect," he says. "If we saw the world through those eyes, it could be a different way of engaging in life."

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David Robson is BBC Future's feature writer. He is on Twitter.

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The 'untranslatable' emotions you never knew you had

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Have you ever felt a little mbuki-mvuki - the irresistible urge to "shuck off your clothes as you dance"? Perhaps a little kilig - the jittery fluttering feeling as you talk to someone you fancy? How about uitwaaien - which encapsulates the revitalising effects of taking a walk in the wind?