More Suggestions for the State of Being Halfway Between Euphoric and Depressed

You’re listening to A Way with Words, the show about language and how we use it. I’m Grant Barrett.

And I’m Martha Barnette. A few weeks ago, we had that call from John in Bismarck, North Dakota.

He was participating in an online program for military veterans, and part of the program included a discussion about how to describe one’s emotions.

Say you’re talking about a scale of emotions from 1 to 10, 1 being clinical depression, and 10 being euphoria.

How do you talk about that emotion that’s right in the middle?

What is number five?

What is the word for that?

And when we put the word out, we got a lot of response on social media, email, and on the telephone.

And, Martha, there was some really good stuff in there.

There really was.

When we talked with John on the phone, he used the term middle emotion, but he wasn’t completely happy with that.

And we kicked around some other ideas like being affectless and insouciant, and those don’t really work either.

A lot of people suggested just a single adjective like complacent, content, balanced, placid, fine, copacetic, unemotional, beige.

I kind of like beige.

Middling, ordinary, unremarkable, homeostatic.

And Mark Hazuda in New Jersey suggested comfortable or, if you’re a Pink Floyd fan, comfortably numb.

I kind of like that.

And David Coven is a resident psychiatrist at the University of Arizona College of Medicine,

And he wrote in with a response that a lot of professionals used, which is the term euthymic or euthymia.

It’s defined in Merriam-Webster’s dictionary as a normal, tranquil mental state or mood,

And apparently they use that clinically to talk about somebody’s emotions.

E-U-T-H-Y-M-I-A?

Euthymia, yes. E-U-T-H-Y-M-I-A. Or you can describe someone as being euthymic. And it comes from a Greek word, thumos, which means soul or spirit.

And then we also heard from Kevin Innes, and he lives in Spokane. And he said that coincidentally, he was listening to our podcast.

And then later in the day, he was listening to a podcast about philosophy.

And they were talking on that podcast about apathia or apatheia, which is a freedom or release from emotion or excitement.

Oh, wow.

I do find you have this list of suggestions from listeners that many of those for me aren’t middle emotions, that they have a negative or positive value, which maybe the other person didn’t feel or didn’t see.

And I think that maybe is partly where we’re coming up with this difficulty is it is so based on your personal experience.

You almost do need a word that most people don’t know.

So you can immediately assign it this one middle value and it doesn’t come up with any baggage.

Right, right.

Something like content just.

No, that’s positive for me.

That’s happy.

Yeah, and there was a complacent for me has a slight negative connotation that suggests an indifference to the world.

Yeah, indifference was another thing that somebody brought up.

But again, that doesn’t really.

For me, that’s negative. That’s way on the negative spectrum, nowhere near the middle.

Right. I’m so interested that on the one hand, we’re having such a hard time coming up with this.

And on the other hand, our listeners stepped up like I’ve never seen.

Seriously. Absolutely. Well, thank you all for your submissions. We really appreciate it every time you write. We consume this stuff voraciously. We read it. We discuss it. We love it. We send it around. And it shows up on future shows. So keep those responses coming to this question and all the others, you can always email us

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