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Comment by wizofaus | Hacker News Reader

Great movie but not the best advice - "morose" doesn't even mean "very sad", it means ill-tempered/in a bad mood. I wouldn't even say there is one good word that means "very sad", but "morose" is definitely not it. The site in question came up with "inconsolable", but that's hardly appropriate if you're talking about "very sad news" (after a few attempts it come back with "somber" which at least sort of works in that case, though I'd still struggle to imagine myself telling a friend that their divorce was "sombre news").

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I think that's the point -- "very sad" is unpoetical because it doesn't convey anything more than "sad", which is itself a generic word. If you're writing poetry or fiction you want to be describing emotional states more interesting than "sad".

The important corollary here is that not all language needs to be poetical. It's OK to use generic language in a lot of situations. Sometimes "I'm very sorry to hear that ____" is the tool for the social situation.

"Very sad" is simple and to the point. There's many situations where anything else would sound inauthentic.

I mean, the goal wasn't to sound "authentic", it was to avoid sounding "lazy" while trying to "woo women", which is the only situation considered relevant in the supposedly-inspiring speech by the maybe-a-bit-creepy professor.

Not meant to school or lecture anyone, but ‘morose’ stems from the Latin ‘mora’, meaning ‘delay', something slow. Examples from Latin.: _mora solvendi_ (delay in paying), _compensatio morae_ (compensation for the delay).

I believe that the original meaning is lost [or warped at least] when it becomes synonymous with bleak, cheerless, chill, Cimmerian, cloudy, cold, depressing...

But since it means ‘slow’ it also relates to blue, dejected, depressed, despondent, down, droopy, hangdog, inconsolable, low, melancholic[0].

[0]https://www.merriam-webster.com/thesaurus/morose

In fact, the Portuguese (false) cognate "moroso(a)" and its noun "morosidade" means exactly that: sluggish, slow.

And "telephone" comes from roots meaning "sound at a distance" or "far away sound". That doesn't make it right to say you heard the "telephone of laughter" when you meant to say the "distant sound of laughter" .

Sometimes you're deliberately trying to be inoffensive and formal, in which case claiming you're morose makes you look like a clown.

Compare "I was sad to hear about your grandmother" or "I was very sad..." with "I was morose..." or "I was inconsolable..." When it really matters, you need to drop the pretensions from your writing and just be normal.

I'd just go with heartbroken. Or if we're melodic, melancholy.

Heartbroken is a particular type of sadness though, and again, doesn't apply to non-living occurrences (like "news" or "excuses" or "movies"). You'd probably have to use "pathetic" for "excuse", but a "pathetic movie" means something quite different...

Devastated.

Sure, but you wouldn't use that to describe someone who's been very sad for many years and not due to any one particular event.

Depressed, miserable, gloomy, etc.

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