About Us

The idea for the Positive Words Project, like so many ideas, came about over happy hour.

We’re Portlanders. We drink beer. We know beer. We have made our own beer. We have gone to beer festivals and studied the taster’s guides. When I described the flavor of my beer, everyone could imagine what it tasted like because we have the same beer vocabulary. We talked about how our beer vocabulary has influenced how we experience beer. Now that we know what tannins taste like, we can’t un-taste them.

This led to a conversation about an episode of Radio Lab (because everything leads to a conversation about  Radio Lab). We’ve been discussing the colors episode for months. It blew our minds. One segment describes how people who speak different languages see the world - particularly the color of the sky - differently.  

I had an idea. If your vocabulary can influence how you experience beer, and your vocabulary can influence how you see the sky, what else can it influence? Can it influence your mood? Your happiness? Your personality? If we learned more words related to happiness and positivity would we be happier? Would our emotional lives be different? If we knew the names for subtle positive emotions, would we notice and appreciate those emotions more? Can we become the mantis shrimps of happiness? We’re attempting to find out.

We are not psychologists or linguists. We’re two engineers and writer.  We don’t know the best ways to learn about emotions or about language, but we enjoy having rambling conversations where we listen and talk and explore ideas, so that’s the method we’re using here.  We’re making this up as we go along.

Some of our influences for this project include:

• Radio Lab, particularly the colors episode
• The Happiness Hypothesis by Richard Haidt 
•  10 Barrel Brewing Co.’s India-Style Session Ale