Désoeuvrement is an essay by Jack Rusher, published here Thursday, May 13, 2004. It is part of Glossary.
Words fail me.
I first encountered the word désoeuvrement while translating a piece written by friend who is a French poet. I didn't know the word, which is unremarkable because my French is imperfect, so I looked through various French-English dictionaries and learned that it is a synonym for unemployed or idle.
The poet informed me, while we discussed possible word choices for an English equivalent of désoeuvrement, that the word means someone who does not know what to do with his life, his days, his hours, and who lives in despair of the absence of direction and the absence of the desire for a direction — the latter-most sentiment a fine example of Gallic philosophical precision. He was amazed to learn that there is no single English word for this condition, and, after considering the commonality of the emotion, so was I.
We lack, in English, many useful words. I understand that modern fashion has rendered the concept of zaftig nearly obsolete, but why did we lack a word for it when styles were different? Doppelgänger is understandable, but what of raison d'être? There are, when one but looks, dozens of examples from which to choose.
One possible cause for the jejune state of English vocabulary is the omnivorous nature of the language itself, so well suited to robbing other languages of verbs and nouns and hybridizing them in a lingua-genetic experiment, nouning verbs and verbing nouns all the while, that it need not bother to craft subtle neologisms from native Anglo-Saxon roots.
Globalization and the adoption of a globalized version of English will guarantee, faute de mieux, that we continue in this vein forevermore. I look forward to the coming flood of East Indian and Mandarin Chinese additions that we are likely to receive as the center of human culture moves to the center of human population.