If you look for a definition of the word werifesteria online, you will find sources asserting that it is an Old English term for an emotion felt while “wandering longingly through the forest in search of mystery”. However, weifesteria doesn’t have the sound or spelling of an Old English word. It seems more like something you’d see coming out of a Romance language.
Do a bit of research, and you’ll discover that werifesteria is in fact not an Old English word. It’s a term that was invented just a few years ago.
Despite its false history, werifesteria has gained some acceptance. “It describes very well my feelings when I am in the woods,” says Maria Echaniz. There has even been a statue built in honor of the emotion, called the Giant Mac Fiche Werifesteria, a large wild wooden man that one observer describes as looking as if it’s been there forever.
The idea of wandering in a wilderness in search of something unknown is a concept that people recognize, and until the invention of werifesteria, there has been no word for the feeling. So, why not accept werifesteria as a new pixel of emotional granularity? The feeling has deep roots, even if the word is novel.
Perhaps we might say that the people who invented the term werifesteria were suffering from a linguistic variant of werifesteria, lost in the tangled underbrush of emotional language, seeking some kind of new, deeper experience that other words could not describe.
