dictionary of obscure sorrows

n. delight in pronouncing the names of your shampoo’s chemical ingredients—cocamidopropyl betaine, polyquaternium-10, methylchloroisothiazolinone—whose crisp syllables snap together like Legos, which momentarily reassures you that life is a cumulative stack of discrete accomplishments, not a shapeless continuum of extracts from abstracted tragedies like family, entropy, or papaya. –The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows