Reality and phenomena exceed that marvellous but partial map we call language.
Opening a kitchen drawer that suddenly jams is an almost universal experience. You pull once, then again, then try pushing it back in slightly, and finally the drawer opens. Inside, a piece of cutlery had lodged itself sideways. Equally common is the resistance a fridge offers when you try to reopen it immediately after closing it. Or the sensation of having felt your phone vibrate in your pocket when in fact nothing has happened. Or again, that fleeting moment of happiness on waking when we are convinced it is Friday, followed by the disappointment of discovering that it is only Thursday.
These are curious phenomena. They are not rare. They are not difficult to recognise. They are not even ambiguous. Anyone who has experienced one of these situations knows perfectly well what is being discussed. Yet none has a word of its own. To describe them, we are forced to recount them. We have to resort to a circumlocution. We have to say: "that thing that happens when..."
At first, the question seems a mere linguistic curiosity. But it becomes more interesting when examined closely. As with everything, all it takes is to stop and think about why.
Every language contains thousands of words that identify objects, actions, states of mind and relationships. Many describe phenomena essential to survival or social life. Others, by contrast, seem extraordinarily specific. English has petrichor, the term for the smell of earth after rain. It has tittle, the dot above the i. It has zarf, the cardboard sleeve that protects your fingers from the heat of a very hot takeaway drink, like those buckets of terrible coffee people in New York use to warm their hands.
The presence of these words suggests a different question from the one we began with. We should not ask why some experiences have a name. We should ask why so many experiences, though perfectly recognisable, still lack one.
One possible answer is that words arise not primarily to describe the world, but to make thought more economical. Every word spares us a longer description. Every word compresses a recurring circumlocution. Saying nostalgia is simpler than describing, each time, the pain associated with something that is no longer present. Saying chair is simpler than reconstructing, each time, the function of the object we are referring to.
From this perspective, a word can be seen as a successful form of cognitive compression. A description is used so often that it becomes worthwhile to condense it into a term in its own right. Language then functions as a system of optimisation: it preserves the distinctions it deems useful and leaves submerged those that have not yet attained sufficient critical mass.
Words do not merely serve to communicate. They also serve to stabilise conceptual differences. A distinction with a name of its own tends to be recognised more quickly, remembered better and discussed more precisely.
The case of knowledge is instructive. In Italian we have the verb "sapere" and the word "conoscenza". The Greeks, by contrast, distinguished between different ways of knowing. There were δόξα (dòxa), opinion; ἐπιστήμη (epistème), demonstrated knowledge; τέχνη (téchne), knowing how to do something; φρόνησις (frònesis), practical wisdom; σοφία (sofìa), wisdom. Naturally, we too are able to understand these differences. Yet we have to construct them explicitly. The Greek language already offered them as ready-made conceptual structures.
Languages can therefore be regarded as maps of the differences a community has considered important to preserve. Some distinctions become fixed and stable. Others remain dispersed throughout everyday experience without ever becoming concepts in their own right.
Perhaps this is why there are things and acts without names: they are experiences everyone recognises, but which no linguistic community has yet found it worthwhile to separate from the continuous flow of everyday life. They remain in a kind of linguistic-cognitive limbo: present, identifiable, perfectly real, but not yet condensed into a stable form because there is no need to communicate them, or to communicate them frequently.
Every language is the result of this long process of selection. Anything that has a word is a distinction a culture has preserved in practice. Everything else continues to exist in a more fluid state, as a form of shared experience that language constantly brushes against without ever fully capturing. Some of these experiences will, sooner or later, find a name. Others will continue to live in that intermediate zone between perception and concept that precedes the birth of words.
Every dictionary can be read as a repository of the differences a community has managed to make stable enough to separate from the background noise of experience.