Synonyms and Their Distinctions - Part I

I'm taking Latin II this year, and, as if dead language studies weren't hard enough, I don't technically have a teacher.

Yay.

As I've slogged along through declensions and conjugations galore, one of the high-points in such a study has been the vocabulary.  So far, I've learned that there are about sixteen ways to say "to kill" and another eight names for the word "king".  Also, I've been brained with words like, "sword", "shield", "blood", "pain", "gladiators", "soldiers", "camps", "right wings", and "slaves".  (Interestingly enough, a Korean textbook that I flipped through has words like: study, books, paper, students, teachers, classroom, piano, Calculus, doctor, Tiger Balm, and martial arts.  Ho-hum.)

Why am I saying all of this?  Well, nations tend to have abundant synonyms for culturally important words.  To the Romans, the words "death" and "king" were very important, thus there are twenty-seven thousand ways of saying each.  Koreans apparently think that classes are important, and, thus, the vocabulary list in Chapter 1 of a college-level Korean textbook includes all sorts of words that circulate around school.
Recently, media in the United States has seriously taken to dystopian tales, doom, and destruction.  As a result, the words fear, anger, and sorrow have been fine-tuned and slightly, dare I say it, stereotyped.  For example, take the words: crippling, immobilizing, and paralyzing.  You, if you're an attentive author/reader, might notice a repetition of the phrase crippling sorrow, but not so much crippling anger or crippling fear.  On another hand, you also might hear the phrase immobilizing fear, whereas, you might not often hear the phrases immobilizing sorrow or immobilizing anger quite so frequently.  Paralyzing anger, on the other hand, is used by authors as much as paralyzing fear is, while paralyzing sorrow is hardly ever heard of.
So what is it with these distinctions?  Crippling, immobilizing, and paralyzing are all synonyms, yet authors have chosen them differently to modify the words fear, anger, and sorrow.

Some of these differences have bothered me for a while, so I thought it would be fun to compile a list of words like crippling, immobilizing, and paralyzing, then ask you, dear author, to make the distinctions.

~ ~ ~

e.g. Sweating - Fear
Burning - Anger
Roaring - Sorrow

Now you fill in the rest!

1.) Shaking -
Trembling -
Quivering -

2.) Dark -
Grim -
Gloomy -

3.) Red -
Black -
Blue -

4.) Mirthless -
Hurting -
Joyless -

5.) Buried -
Still -
Mindless -

~ ~ ~

Don't forget to leave your answers in the comments section below!

Write on!
Clove
P.S. Are you wondering why I've pointed out this ridiculously-tiny element in writing?  Part II, and the practical side of this discussion, will be here soon!
P.P.S. My answers were: 1.) Sorrow, fear, anger / 2.) Anger, fear, sorrow / 3.) Anger, fear, sorrow / 4.) Sorrow, anger, fear / 5.) Fear, sorrow, anger.  These aren't necessarily the "right" answers; I've just noticed that such phrases tend to stick more than others.