The word to know when you don’t know how to feel?
The perfect word for this comes from today’s slang. In the current vernacular, you would say that he felt meh. It’s recent slang that per Urban Dictionary means
Indifference; to be used when one simply does not care.
For example, from an article on “Five Ways Not to Feel Meh” on Karousing.com:
It’s easy to feel meh. Not up. Not down. Just indifferent. Apethetic. No matter how great life is, we can all fall into the lull of feeling, well, nothing. We get caught up in work, patterns, habits, and fears. I’m here to tell you that there’s a danger to feeling meh. Just like that frog in the pot of water that sits there as the temperature is turned up slowly until it’s boiled to death. Nothing kills your spirit more than the gradual and continuous malaise of feeling meh.
Although some folks might use meh to mean blasé, others use it in a much more neutral fashion.
Here are some words and phrases sometimes used in such a situation:
• He felt at a loss
• He was dumfounded (“Shocked and speechless”)
• He was all at sea
• He was bewildered (“Baffled, confused, mystified, at a loss, or uncertain”)
I immediately thought of the word ambivalent.
Ambivalence is defined as:
- simultaneous and contradictory attitudes or feelings (as attraction and repulsion) toward an object, person, or action
- a. continual fluctuation (as between one thing and its opposite) b. uncertainty as to which approach to follow
A common word for this condition is nonplussed. The link takes you to an online thesaurus for a list of synonyms.