Oleka

• The awareness of how few days are memorable.

• Another day, another week, another year. We’ve heard this song before. Our lives are built of the same few notes, repeated over and over. It’s not a grand symphony, full of surprises. It’s a song sung in canon, that simply carries on until the tune gets stuck in your head. But then the verse changes over, and for the life of you, you can’t remember how it’s supposed to go.

• Coined in 2012 by John Koenig in The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, a project, to create a compendium of invented words for every emotion we might all experience but don’t yet have a word for.

 CURTIS MACNEWTON