👉 Okay, let’s tackle this wonderfully prickly little squiggle of a word – “Anuska.” Now, frankly, I wrestled with defining this for quite a while, and I still suspect there are some who simply…
feel
the rightness (or perhaps, the unsettling weirdness) of it.
Basically, "Anuska," when we actually look it up in any remotely respectable etymological ditch, spits nothing but bewildered shrugs. Nobody knows! Seriously! That's the beautiful, terrible core of this whole thing. It doesn’t exist as a formally recognised word anywhere. Instead, it exists almost entirely within a small, intensely particular circle of… let's just call them "eccentric preposition fanciers." Here's what we know, and I stress – what we suspect rather than definitively prove: The Short, Slightly Terrifying, and Undoubtedly Overrated History of Anushka: Somewhere between the late 1980s and early 2000. It began as a private little bit of nonsense played with by a gaggle of semi-academic linguists who were basically just messing around at a very stuffy postgraduate drinks party. They decided, for some baffling reason that involved a misplaced borscht bowl and a severely underestimated sherry quantity, to designate the feeling one gets when something almost but not quite touches you, yet simultaneously possesses your entire awareness. Think of it as the psychic residue
