Sagambodie (saa-gaam-boe-dee):
Noun:
- The warm, fuzzy, feeling of being indoors on a cold day or inverse.
- Pursuit of better things.
- The relationship between name and subject of that name.
Credit: Bessam, Tim (3796/5) IHG Intala Dictionary
This word needed making. I was going to continue that ‘Excerpt’ from my last post, but it wasn’t going anywhere. It was…uh…going to be pretty awful.
Instead of a convoluted set-up to introduce the word, I will explain it better.
Don’t worry about the featured image. That is the result of two minutes of drawing in Paint 3D and more than a year of tinkering with some sounds, symbols and grammar. Maybe I will explain later.
When I’m done, I hope you come to know this word I came up with in the same way I do.
The first time I thought of this word, I was thinking about the following:
Imagine you are in a street on a cold night.
Alone.
You look into the window of a house, glowing with light and happy-looking people.
What do you feel?
Sagambodie.
What would you be feeling if you looked out the window of a climate-controlled building wondering what it would be like to suffer wind, blistering sun and bitter chill?
Sagambodie.
You are deep in woop woop (Aussie for middle of nowhere) and you see a random house.
If you’re wondering why the hell someone decided to live there, or are wishing you did, that’s Sagambodie you’re feeling.
“I mean, they say you die twice. One time when you stop breathing and a second time, a bit later on, when somebody says your name for the last time.”
-Banksy
Sagambodie also describes the relationship between any person or object and the name attached.
Everyone knows that some people just look like a ‘Bob’ or some other name, but Sagambodie is more than that.
Sagambodie makes people do crazy things at seemingly arbitrary points in time and space.
We mark the areas that define the rules people live by with names. A name ties together the ideals, identity and shared history that states are built on. Even in places where there are no border fences and boundaries are defined by studs in the road, we’re still fascinated by the concept of being in two countries at the same time.
Sagambodie is why international recognition of new countries is so important. If a new state wants to be equal to all others, it must have its Sagambodie recognised as real and independent from any other.
That is Sagambodie. Sagambodie is the accumulation of living experience into a name.
Every year, we launch tonnes of explosives in displays that may have taken months to organize. Yet, the first sunrise of every year looks the same. No other species celebrates the passage of time in such a way. To them, it is just another day.
New Year’s Eve is still special. It is because somehow, we manage to condense our hopes, fears, memories and experiences into the name of a year.
It’s special because so many of us have attached the shared experiences of the planet into the year’s name. I imagine a year as a jug we make that slowly fills with ever-flowing time. When the year is done, we move an empty jug into place, free to contain a year’s worth of time.
Sagambodie is why some of us decide to make resolutions. The next year has no attachments to what happened in the last year. So maybe, we hope, the next jug can be a little better.
The changing of the name is a special moment. It is not special for any cosmological reason; it is special moment because human beings made it special all by ourselves.
When 2017 ticks over into 2018, or whenever it happens to be when you are reading this, know that the anticipation of the new year has a name.
These vague ideas didn’t have a name that I could find. They do now. Sometimes, when there is no word for something, it needs to be made.
Have a happy new year!
Sagamaya 