Back in April of this year, a coworker of mine supplied the word lugubrious at my request for a word to freely associate with. After two straight months of intense free association work, I finally made it all the way to sonder.
To leave you sondering lugubriously at the inner workings of my mind, I'll show you the definitions of both of these words.
Lugubrious - exaggeratedly or affectedly mournful
Sonder - the realization and understanding that all other people have lives as complex as one's own
The word sonder[1] comes from the Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows and ironically has grown out of obscurity to be face of that very concept. It reminds me of that math joke of how there are no boring numbers[2]; whichever obscure sorrow becomes well-known enough to represent the entire set is fundamentally a poor representation of it.
Or if perhaps obscure means "not readily understood" rather than "relatively unknown", then the Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows is a misnomer and chock full of such comprehensible sorrows as:
The Wends - the frustration that you’re not enjoying an experience as much as you should
Lyssamania - the irrational fear that someone you know is angry at you
Funkenzwangsvorstellung[3] - the primal trance of watching a campfire in the dark
With this, I'd like to leave you with one last obscurity to rule them all. My Frankenstein[4] creation shall satisfy all definitions of obscure: visually dim, not readily understood, relatively unknown, and (most importantly) constituting the unstressed vowel \ə\. Behold:
Luguwendlyssafunkenvorstellung - exaggerated mourning that you're not enjoying the primal trance of watching a campfire in the dark because you're afraid someone you know is angry at you
[1] Does not rhyme with wonder as one might ponder. ↩
[2] Suppose ∃ a boring number ∈ ℕ. Then ∃ a smallest boring number β. Of course, being the smallest boring number β is quite interesting, making it no longer boring. Therefore ∄ a boring number ∈ ℕ. ↩
[3] There are no words in English that rhyme with this. ↩
[4] 's monster ↩