A good day to you, fellow literary lover, and welcome to today’s episode of An Assemblage of Grandiose and Bombastic Grandiloquents. We are going to get a little existential here today, so strap yourselves in and prepare for today’s word: onism.

‘Onism’ is a rather complex, created word meaning ‘the frustration of being stuck in just one body, that inhabits only one place at a time, which is like standing in front of the departures screen at an airport, flickering over with strange place names like other people’s passwords, each representing one more thing you’ll never get to see before you die—and all because, as the arrow on the map helpfully points out, ‘you are here’.’ That definition, taken from our friends at The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, is a rather poetic definition of the word. If we look at the structure, we find that ‘onsim’ is a portmanteau of ‘monism’ and ‘onanism’. ‘Monsim’ is a theory or doctrine that denies the existence of a distinction or duality in a particular sphere, such as that between matter and mind, or God and the world; in other words, the belief that only one supreme being, or God, exists. It comes from modern Latin ‘monismus’, which in turn is from the Greek ‘monos’ meaning ‘single’. ‘Onanism’, on the other hand, has a rather succinct meaning: masturbation. It comes from the early 18th century, from French ‘onanisme’ or modern Latin onanismus’, which comes from the name Onan, of the bible verse Genesis 38:9, who practised coitus interruptus. 

One could suppose, then, that the joining of these two words forms the belief in being or using one body permanently. Another definition for onism is that sudden dreadful realization that you are you, and only you, and stuck in your body and you're not omniscient and the universe is filled with other people just like that but you still can't live their lives and they can't live yours. I told you it was going to get heavy.

Isn’t language wonderful?

Written by Taylor Davidson, Read by Zane C Weber

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