“Use Your Words”

There’s twice as many words to describe negative emotions

I clicked on this story, and a sentence jumped out at me. Talking about the English language;

Of those 500,000 words total, as much as 3,000 are used to describe emotions — two-thirds of which are used to describe negative emotions.

As a fiction writer this seems both accurate and interesting. All we have to convey a mood are words, but positive moods are harder to describe. As a result writing about negative moods often reads much more expressive. No wonder really, we’ve got many more words to choose from to express that negative mood.

That got me thinking, do we in general express more negativity? To answer ‘yes’ to that question just doesn’t sit well with me. I still believe we as human beings spend, or should spend, as much time expressing positive moods as negative moods.

I think the ‘problem’ is not expression, but verbal expression. From very young we’re told to ‘use our words’ when we are expressing something negative like frustration or anger. But no caretaker would scold a toddler to use their words when laughing, breaking out in song, skipping around or doing a little wiggle dance. (If that caretaker is anything like me, they are much more likely to join in than insist they tell us what they are feeling.) And this resulted in twice as many words for negative emotions.

But those twice as many words, are a little misleading. Because when I think more about it, because it is more acceptable to act out positive emotions, words to describe positive emotions end up being verbs. If I write “He walked in, whistling a tune” I have set a mood. Is ‘whistling’ an emotion? No, it’s a verb for making sound while expelling air through the lips. But, a person is much more likely to whistle while feeling upbeat. He’s in a whistling mood. And we all know that mood is not bad. If I want the mood more positive, I throw in an other verb. “He walked in with a bounce in his step, whistling a tune” Bouncing isn’t a emotion either, but this guy just went from having a good morning to having woken up on the right side of someone else’s bed.

“Whistle” and “Bounce” probably weren’t counted among those 1000 words for positive emotion. But now I am wondering, if we did start to count verbs, would positive emotions still total half the words of negative emotions? Or would it start to look much more equal?