exulansis

What it means

You spent five months at a research station in Antarctica. The sun did not set for most of it. At the first dinner back, someone asks how it was. You try: the skua that took a sandwich out of your hand, the silence after the generator cut out. Their eyes go to the dessert menu. By the third dinner your answer is “cold”, followed by a question about their kitchen renovation. That is exulansis: the point where you stop telling a story because nobody can take it in.

It needs an experience far enough outside the listener’s life that they have no hook to hang it on. That can be a war, a long illness, a year in prison, a childhood in a country that no longer exists, or something good that would sound like boasting. It does not need anyone to be rude. Most listeners ask kindly and wait for a version they can follow. The cost comes later: details that are never said aloud stop being checked against anyone, and by the tenth year you are not sure the skua happened.

Where it comes from

John Koenig posted exulansis to The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows on Tumblr. The date is unsettled. The post now displays 17 March 2015, and Wiktionary follows it. But the Internet Archive captured the same post, at the same address, on 7 September 2014, with a line saying it had been posted six days before. This entry uses 2014, the earliest date that can be checked. The book from Simon & Schuster (2021) prints the entry on page 15.

Koenig takes the word from Latin exulans, “exile” or “wanderer”, the species name of the wandering albatross, Diomedea exulans, a seabird known for long flights over open ocean. Wiktionary analyses the ending as -sis, a suffix forming nouns of condition. It gives the IPA /ˌɛk.səˈlæn.sɪs/ and cites a 2019 University of Oklahoma Press anthology among its uses in print.

How to use it

I’ve hit exulansis with the hospital stuff; now I just say “it went fine” and change the subject. Casual; used as a label for a choice the speaker has already made.

Veterans’ memoirs are often written out of exulansis, for a reader who is not at the table. Literary; a critic’s word for why a book exists.

What it is not

Monachopsis. Monachopsis is the long sense of not fitting a place: the wrong shape for the room, for months or years. Exulansis is about one story and the people who cannot receive it. A returning soldier can fit his hometown perfectly well, know every street and every face, and still stop talking about the eight months that happened elsewhere.

Sonder. Sonder runs outward: you glimpse a stranger and realise they carry a whole unheard life. Exulansis runs the other way. You are the one with the unheard life, the listener cannot picture it, and you are the one who decides to stop. In sonder the story stays untold because it is out of reach; in exulansis, because telling it has failed.

In the wild

• G R O O V Y, EXULANSIS, an 18-track experimental album from California, released 22 August 2016. Its Bandcamp notes define the title word.