Dween – the 1,028,110th word in the English Language

The English language is abundant, but not always perfect. It absorbs lots of words from other languages, and as long as people arrive from other countries and settle here, we’ll continue to have a massively expressive and colourful language that grows and develops and continues to be increasingly rich. There are words that cannot be translated into English, and in the English language there are words that don’t translate either. The word ‘coy’ doesn’t have an equivalent either in Italian or French, whilst the English language, with a vocabulary of 1,028,109 words still doesn’t have a decent word for the Italian ‘simpatico’ or the French ‘sympathique’ – the translation says ‘nice’ but it’s nothing to do with nice. While I was learning Reiki it was my practise to wake every morning and say these words – ‘Just for today, I will not anger, I will not worry, I will be grateful, I will be diligent and I will be kind to others.’ It’s a lovely spiritual affirmation isn’t it? But as a hypnotherapist and meditator these words also concerned me. There is a concept about putting ideas into the subconscious, which reckons that if you say “don’t think about pink elephants!” the first thing one does is visualise galloping pink elephants charging down the London Road. So when one thinks about not being angry, one has to think about anger, and this annoyed me and made me angry and what annoyed me even more was that there’s no word in English that is the opposite of anger, and because of that it’s really tricky to imagine the non-angry state. So I started to think about the opposite of anger… and… it’s kind of… kind of… calm and serene, sweet and patient and poised, and the more I thought about it, the more I realised there is an opposite state to being angry, and the only thing we are missing was the word itself. So I lay in bed, wondering what the word was, and I emailed a request to my subconscious to supply a word for the non-angry person or state, and it came back with the word ‘dween’. Dween? I thought… are you having me on? It sounds far too much like ‘dweeb’ but as I mulled over it, I liked it more and more… dween has an element of the dream about it; to be dween is to be calmed beyond the point of being soothed. It’s definitely a non-aggressive word, and as I gave it more thought, phrases came to mind, such as “she’s just so utterly dween, nothing annoys her,” and ‘it’s a genuinely dween dog’ meaning it was peaceful and loveable and would never bite you. So the more I thought about the glory of the word dween, the more pleasant and happy I felt about it. Having taken this on board it seemed that the Reiki mantra should really go like this: “Just for today, I shall be dween, I shall not worry…’ hang on a sec… do I need a word for not worrying? Well that’s something I can’t possibly be worried about.

Anyway, here’s my question to you…are you dween by nature? Will anger-management make you more dween? Do you feel better for knowing that you are dween? Of course you do. Being dween is so loveable, it means that you just can’t be angry, however hard you try. If you’re dween you can’t be mean.

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