Posted on 06/12/2005 5:49:48 AM PDT by SlowBoat407
Schadenfreude.
There, I’ve said it. Better yet, written it. You have no idea how good this feels.
It’s been ages since I first slipped this polysyllabic German noun into a column.
“What is this ?” my editor yelped.
“Schadenfreude?” I asked innocently. “It means taking pleasure in someone else’s misery.”
“Why don’t you just say that then?” he demanded.
“ I did. In German. We have no word for it.”
“This isn’t a German newspaper. You have enough trouble with English. Stick to the language you know best.”
“Muy bien,” I muttered and replaced s chadenfreude with a long, awkward English phrase I’ve since forgotten.
A few months later, I tried again.
“No s chadenfreude!” he hollered into the phone.
“Mea culpa,” I gulped, adding stupidly, “but I see it all the time in The New Yorker.”
“That’s nice. Next time you write a piece for The New Yorker, use it. In the meantime, don’t.”
And so the s chadenfreude power struggle began.
“No one knows what it means,” he insisted every time I tried to insert the 13-letter word.
“Yes they do. Or they can figure it out,” I whined.
“It’s a terrible word,” he declared.
In short, s chadenfr eude was verboten. Verboten wasn’t verboten. Neither was “angst,” nor a bevy of words borrowed from foreign languages. Decolletage? Derriere? Carte blanche? Carpe diem? Gesundheit? All acceptable.
I made a last stab at s chadenfreude a couple of months ago. My exasperated editor agreed to conduct a survey to see how many writers were familiar with the word.
“No dice,” he announced, with a touch of – dare I say it? – s chadenfreude.
“No one knew what it meant.”
“You only asked the sports guys, didn’t you?” I wailed.
Then I devised a plan. I’d sneak the word into a quote, with questions like this:
“Would you say this whole thing reeks of s chadenfreude?”
Unfortunately, most of the people I talk to are council members, cranks and kooks.
“Huh?” they’d reply.
So I have been left to morosely underline the word I-dare-not-write whenever I stumble upon it in other publications.
And I’ve spent many melancholic hours consumed with envy for these writers and their unfettered access to big words.
I also keep a tally of how many times the word pops up in Google: 434,000 hits as of Friday.
In the process, I’ve discovered s chadenfreude Web sites. Found a comedy group by that name. A punk band, too.
Searching the Internet, I see that even Rush Limbaugh dared utter the word. He has millions of listeners. I’ll bet none objected.
Schadenfreude was even dictionary.com’s Word of the Day on May 10, 2000.
“A malicious satisfaction in the misfortune of others,” read the official definition.
A good word, no?
But not for me.
So, you wonder, why is today different from any other?
My editor is out of town. He’s taken a well-deserved long weekend off.
No sooner had he announced his plans than it hit me. This was my chance. Not only could I write the word, I could do other crazy things. Heck, I’d even be able to use parentheses. (My editor hates them, says they “junk up” newspaper copy.)
“While you’re away, I’m going to use s chadenfreu de,” I warned him earlier this week.
“Better not, ” he said, with a sly laugh. “You see it everywhere these days. In fact, it’s become a cliche .”
Reach Kerry at (757) 446-2306 or kerry.dougherty@cox.net.
And I'll bet she doesn't realize, when she uses the word "the", just how much we use it here, too.
When I was studying German, I was amazed to learn all the different forms of the articles "a" and "the" you have to know. I think there was something like 16 different forms--and you must use the right one each time, or it changes the meaning of what you are saying.
The second syllable is clipped, like when you say the word "sodden". You more or less say it through your nose.
The "r" is rolled, but while a Spanish speaker rolls his "r" on the tip of his tongue, a German speaker rolls his on the back of his tonge. In practice, if you pronounce it like Tom Brokaw pronounces an "l", you'll come pretty darn close.
Kids are able to wallow in schadenfreude quite without any training at all.
Does that mean they are by nature all future FReepers and the educrats train it out of them? ;-)
BTTT
Holy sh!t!
My favorite is Sonntagsnachmittagspaziergang
Maybe you know German, but for those who don't, that translates to "Sunday afternoon walk."
That's not really a Russian word, since the roots are German. How about these:(Translation:)
KavkazChat - the longest word! (game)
Rentgenehlektrokardiograficheskogo - 33 letters
('of x-ray electrocardiographic').
(Translation:)
1. The longest word in the Russian language, though not registered in the dictionary:
Vodogryazetorfoparafinolechenie; ('water-mud-parafin treatment')
2. Longest word in the Bulgarian language consists of 39 letters and means 'Do not disrupt the constitution', and looks like this:
NEPROTIVOKONSTITUTSIONSTVUVATELSTVUVAYTE;
3. Newspaperman Bruce LaBruce in one of his articles asserted that there is no longer word in modern English than 'antidisestablishmentarianism', but one of his readers disagreed and sent in his collection of letters:
Pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcaniosis;
This means "preparatory work on the contribution to the discussion on the maintaining system of support of the material of the aviation survey simulator device within the north-east part of the coast artillery of the Baltic."
But the "pneumono..." word is a technical word, i.e. it
is part of medical terminology...so it's not in general
use....some of the other foreign words mentioned in some
of the previous posts seem like those that can be
used in non-technical settings.
It comes as absolutely no shock to me that a people who could devise a word like the above would murder six million people in cold blood.
You are the winner! Did they miss any letters? Where's the 'Z'? Why, they could have gotten another 3 inches if they included 'Z'.
Is it just me, or are the long words actually easier to spell than the short ones?
bttt
Schadenfreude = Nee-Ner ... Nee-Ner ... Neeee-Ner ...
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