It was 1984 when TV producer John Lloyd teamed up with Douglas Adams, the author of The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy, to write A Dictionary of Things There Aren’t Any Words for Yet — But There Ought to Be. One of the ought-to-be words that the pair concocted was brabant, the pleasurable emotion people feel as they try to see how they can provoke someone else into annoyance.
Does it push your buttons for me to include brabant as a legitimate emotion? Do you feel irritated by words that people just make up out of thin air?
Remember this: Every word in existence was an invention at some point. Fake words become real words when people find them useful enough to repeat them. Even words that are obscure because they aren’t repeated very much are real to someone. There isn’t any objective distinction that makes some kinds of language more genuine than the words that people like Lloyd and Adams playfully invent.
What makes a specific emotion real is that people feel it. The pleasure that comes from taunting someone else to the point of losing their cool is a real feeling that’s familiar to many people, and there is no other word for that emotion than brabant.
