ideas that cry out for a word to describe them

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

I was thinking about the word “cool” today. Cool like Frank Sinatra, not like the climate in Boston. It used to be slang, but I think it’s long since crossed over into being just a regular word. And I’d speculate that the success of the word is because it fills a void in the English language, where no other single word I can think of really fits the bill.

“Cool” doesn’t just mean “good”, it’s more like a mix of “good”, “popular”, “nonchalant”, “stylish”, etc. We all understand this concept. If someone said “You know, that quality that James Bond and John Shaft have, like Michael Jordan or Sinatra” you’d probably know what they meant, but without being able to say “They’re cool” it’s not so easy to articulate. The closest I can come is to say “It’s like a casual excellence.”

So that got me wondering: What other universally understood ideas are there that really cry out for a word to describe them? And feel free to invent a word that fits the bill.

2

Sometimes another language has a word for a specific concept that your own language does not. Schadenfreude is by far my favorite such word.

There should be a word for the desire to have another being depend only upon yourself for comfort to the exclusion of all others. You see this desire in some new mothers, who want to be the only one their babies will come to, babies who scream in anyone else’s arms. You can see the smug look of satisfaction on their faces as they take their babies back and the babies stop crying instantly. In the spirit of schadefreude, I shall call it ungesundschutzfreude - unhealthy protection/dependency happiness.