Psithurism

'Psithurism' is a word you will never use in your life. You fancy yourself pretty handy with the old thesaurus, a king of synonyms as it were, but sometimes these things just get out of hand. Like psithurism, which refers to the rustling of leaves in the wind, or petrichor, the smell of the earth after heavy rain. Seriously, which Google Slides document are you going to throw those two bangers into?

The word you tend to use most when you see something amazing is 'whoa' and the second most popular one is a swear word. You deploy these very boring descriptors on everything from a new iPhone update to the Ashley Madison documentary, but the first time you head out to nature and feel fully enveloped by the sensations you realise that language has started failing you.

Getting unyoked is about many indescribable things, and one of those is experiencing words that make absolutely no sense when you try to use them in a sentence. They're like flat arrangements of letters that suddenly enter a third dimension, hitting your senses from all angles and maybe leading you back to that second, unprintable word, but in an entirely different context. So go on; get your dose of psithurism. No, we don't know how to pronounce it. Nobody does.

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