Frustrate is a frustrating word. It’s often a throwaway term people use to deflect inquiries into their emotions, a vague label that thwarts follow up questions. In the same manner, nobody can get quite to the bottom of what the linguistic origin of frustration is. There was an old Latin term, frustratus, referring to those efforts which have been disappointed, often through deception, but the trail grows cold there, with no clues to indicate any related concepts or metaphorical foundations.
So, in the place of an entry on the feeling of frustration, I’m choosing to write about the more concrete emotion of feeling stymied. A stymie is a situation in the game of golf when one’s ball is on the putting green, but an opponent’s ball sits directly in between that ball and the hole.
Several decades after the Scots invented this term for the game of golf, it was adopted in English as a word to describe the emotion that occurs when one discovers that the way forward has been blocked, whether by an opponent or by simple happenstance.
