2013-05-30

Mal de coucou

Q: mal de coucou

I’d like to know something about ‘mal de coucou’. I think it means something like ‘pain of the cuckoo’ (?), but I don’t see the connection between these words and the definition you gave them. Could you explain this to me?”  –waveringmind (ask me a question)
……
Here’s the definition of mal de coucou:
n. a phenomenon in which you have an active social life but very few close friends—people who you can trust, who you can be yourself with, who can help flush out the weird psychological toxins that tend to accumulate over time—which is a form of acute social malnutrition in which even if you devour an entire buffet of chitchat, you’ll still feel pangs of hunger.

The irony of posting this to facebook would not have been lost. But I like the lexicon here. It captures this experience that some of us feel, but never had the right phrase to express such complex thing. mal de coucou.