We are always interested in “new” emotions. Though I doubt whether there really are any new emotions that are unrelated to our relationship with technology.

After all, we humans are pretty much the same as humans were a thousand, two thousand years ago except we know what’s happened since and we build on what’s gone before.

We begin to make finer descriptions of and distinctions between feelings. I was quite surprised to learn that “empathy” as a word didn’t exist 100 years ago, though “pity” and “sympathy” did.

Elevation is a new word to describe that warm tingling feeling in the chest you feel when seeing, even reading about, acts of kindness or heroism that motivates you to be better.

Now there’s idolspize, a word that succinctly describes the tricky emotion between idolizing and despising in the Washington Post.

The best book I know about “new” emotions is “They Have a Word for It : A Lighthearted Lexicon of Untranslatable Words and Phrases by Howard Rheingold.

It’s so good that I’ve decided to create a new category so I can talk about some of them.