On Regret



	ON REGRET. I believe everyone has a baseline emotion: a consistent background feeling that creates context for a person's worldview. This baseline emotion determines your outlook on life, and your basic reaction to external stimuli. For some people, it's delight, for others it's anger, for some it's outrage and for many mothers it's apparently dissatisfaction. For me, it's regret. Regret is to me what snow is to Eskimoes, what levels of formality are to the Japanese, what vulgarity is to Americans. I know regret so well that the single word fails miserably to do it justice. So many ideas and concepts are subsumed in the simple English catch-all 'regret.' Having tasted many, if not all, of them, I know their flavors well, and know they are as different as lemons and steak and creme brulee. So why call them all 'regret'? Yes, of course I know they're Inuit not Eskmoes, and I know they don't have zillion words for snow after all. I'm using a metaphor that everyone is familiar with to make a point, so get over it. Regret: according to Webster's, comes from the ME, regretten, from the OFr, regreter, to bewail the dead, from re + Gmc base as in OE gretan, ON grata, Goth gretan, to weep. Given my deep familiarity with regret, I feel I must enrich the language, add new terms to better define what I feel, and by defining it understand it, and by understanding it repress it. Given that someone else already added one Latinate prefix to the Germanic root (pretty typically weird for English), I'll feel free to take the great old 'gret' and do some creative new things to it. Here then, is a selected glossary of my emotional life. Amoregret--feeling bad about passing up what may well have been your one and only chance at what may have just possibly been true love but you'll never know it because the opportunity will never arise again in this lifetime and you'll be stuck living each day seeking some pale shadow of that perfect, true emotion that you were too dim to recognize when you were feeling it in the first place Anextragret--feeling bad about something you failed to do for someone else Antilexigret--feeling bad about words never spoken/written that you wish had been Antipossegret--feeling bad about something you never had a chance to do that you never will do but wish you could Arachnegret--feeling bad about killing a spider that wasn't really bothering you but was just in the wrong place when you felt like smooshing something Cyclogret--feeling bad about not feeling bad about something you feel you should feel bad about Exoexpectegret--feeling bad about failing to live up to others' hopes and dreams for you that you know you won't ever live up to Expectegret--feeling bad about failing to live up to your own high expectations for what you might accomplish before you were, say, 31, to pick an arbitrary age. Hemigret--only feeling half bad about something Hypergret--a combination of cyclogret and any other form of regret that feeds back on itself and ends up growing increasingly intense over time, rather than fading like most emotions, mercifully, do. Lexigret--feeling bad about words spoken/written at some point in the past Malextragret--feeling bad about something you did for someone else that went terribly terribly wrong Megalogret--feeling that you feel worse about things than anyone else in the entire world could possibly feel Neogret--feeling bad about something very recent Paleogret--feeling bad about something that happened a long, long time ago Polygret--feeling bad about many things at once Postmultipossegret--feeling bad about something you did many times and enjoyed, but will never do again Pregret--feeling bad about something that hasn't even happened yet Retrogret--feeling bad about making someone else feel bad Unigret--feeling bad about only a single thing at a time (I'm not very familiar with this, but figure it's at least theoretically possible) Unipossegret--feeling bad about something you had an opportunity to do long ago that you failed to do not realizing that the opportunity would never arise again So now, instead of wasting paragraphs and paragraphs trying to describe my emotional state, I can simply say that for the past two weeks I've been wracked with megalogret over a hypergret triggered by a terrible combination of amoregret and unipossegret, abetted by expectogret. It's just that simple. Of course, I'm also pregretting the fact that I'm almost certainly going to lexigret that statement.