The Meaning of a New Word
I was scanning through the New York Times this morning in search of something to write about when I came across the word schadenfreude. As usual when I come across a word I don’t know – and this has been a habit even before I hit my teens – I stopped reading and looked the word up.
Schadenfreude means taking pleasure from someone else’s misfortune. Now who in the hell would want to do that, I instantly thought. But then I remembered how much pleasure it gave me over the years when I heard my narcistic ex-husband was having a bad time. So much for my momentary feeling of superiority.
And I knew if I thought about it longer, I would come up with other instances in which I took pleasure from someone else’s pain. We humans are not a nice lot. I’ve long known this, but it was confirmed in my head even stronger after reading Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari. It’s a book I highly recommend, by the way.
The book concluded that we humans were the cause of most extinctions and that groups of more than 100 humans quickly found something to go to war over – beginning with religion and politics. The big item in today’s news that has everybody disagreeing is Covid. Masks, no masks. Vax or no vax. Isolation or herd immunity.
I wonder how humankind is still managing to survive?
Pat Bean is a retired award-winning journalist who lives in Tucson with her canine companion, Scamp. She is a wondering-wanderer, avid reader, enthusiastic birder, Lonely Planet Community Pathfinder, Story Circle Network board member, author of Travels with Maggie available on Amazon (Free on Kindle Unlimited), and is always searching for life’s silver lining.
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What conclusion am I to draw about us Germans from the fact that there’s no real equivalent for this word in English? 😉
schadenfreude (also: glee, gloating, gloat, malicious glee, gloating joy, epicaricacy, malicious-joy, malicious pleasure)
Thanks, Sandra, for this information. I think “malicious glee” is a very good translation.
Pit: This to my personal email from a friend: “I know the meaning of schadenfreude only because my sister-in-law is German and she once explained it to me. It is the unspoken pleasure in seeing someone else’s troubles. I love the way Germans put together nouns to make words, sometimes very long ones.”
This ability, that German can simply put togther nouns, is something Mark Twain commented on in his essay “The Awful German Language”. If I remember correctly, he describes that as words “marching along.”
There is that famous word “Donaudampfschiffahrtsgesellschaft”, which we added to as much as possible, like “”Donaudampfschiffahrtsgesellschaftskapitaen” and more and more. 😀 I still like to do that. 😉
Well, I’m 82, Pit, and just learned the meaning of the word in English, so it beats me. As I was once taught, the meanings of words are in people. What one word means to one person might mean another thing to a second person. Thanks for commenting.
You’re welcome, Pat. 🙂
I seem to remember from my (few) studies in linguisticsthat the meaning of words is defined by their usage. That would come close to what you write here.