I need the word for…

While lying abed this morn­ing, a ques­tion popped into my mind: “You know how some­times things go sour abrupt­ly and you have this detached sense of watch­ing your life col­lapse in slow motion? What’s the fam­i­ly-friend­ly word for that?”

There are over 500,000 words in the Eng­lish lan­guage, and most of us have nev­er heard 80% of them. Take didap­per, for exam­ple. It’s a real word (a small grebe as it turns out), but you’ve like­ly nev­er even heard it. You are no doubt an artic­u­late speak­er with a wide-rang­ing vocab­u­lary, and yet you could­n’t pick a didap­per out of a line­up if it mugged you. Grebe is just five let­ters and yet if I played it in Scrab­ble you’d make me whip out a dic­tio­nary to prove it was real.

There are hun­dreds of thou­sands of words just like that. There must be one for this! Every­one I’ve asked knows exact­ly the feel­ing I’m describ­ing, and yet they can’t think of a polite name for it.

In case you’re still con­fused about that feel­ing, here are some oth­er descrip­tions:

• the sick­ly feel­ing that drowns your mind when you remem­ber that you left your presentation/homework/wallet at home
• the sen­sa­tion of your bow­els plum­met­ing to your knees as you real­ize you’re not alone when you thought you were
• the instant your mind achieves total calm and with per­fect clar­i­ty gazes upon your mis­take in all its splen­dor
• the sud­den jolt that runs through your body at the sound of a shot­gun round being cham­bered unex­pect­ed­ly

That feel­ing. It’s not fear, although fear often fol­lows on its heels. It’s not surprise–surprise is hav­ing some­thing unex­pect­ed hap­pen whether good or bad. This is the sen­sa­tion that fol­lows sur­prise as you begin to process the event and real­ize that it is very, very bad.

Most emo­tions are des­ti­na­tions (the state of hap­pi­ness or sor­row, for instance), this one is more of a jour­ney.

What’s the word?