DEC
14
2009
The Copy D. Word of the Week
- Posted By:
- Copy D
- Date:
- December 14th, 2009 /// Copy D. Word of the Week
scha⋅den⋅freu⋅de [shahd-n-froi-duh]
–n.
1. satisfaction or pleasure felt at someone else’s misfortune.
An inescapable sense of schadenfreude enveloped him as he witnessed the dog steal his brother’s burrito.
December 15th, 2009 at 11:13 am
Yes! I love the Copy D’s Word of the Week feature. In this world of message clutter, we marketing types are too often forced to celebrate the richness of our native tongue through the rare opportunities for wordplay afforded by occasional ad headlines and logotype taglines – and then we’re crammed into a five-syllable sentiment.
And isn’t it words like ‘Schadenfreude’ that really celebrate the flexibility of the English language and it’s carte blanche license to borrow freely from other languages?
Schadenfreude is itself borrowed from German – a language that lacks the wealth of synonyms and shades of distinction that English affords to the point that a German speaker cannot distinguish between house and home or mind and brain but at the same time manages to have separate words for knowledge that results from recognition from knowledge that results from understanding.
As it is the Christmas season and one of my favorite things to do at this time of the year is having a few beers with friends and family in a warm, crowded bar (Crave, perhaps), I’ll share my favorite German word that, like Schadenfreude, illustrates another of the German languages unique characteristics: the propensity to stick a bunch of words together to form a new word to describe something very complex.
‘Gemütlichkeit’ is hard to define, but it describes the feeling of emotional belonging, social warmth, cheerfulness one feels when spending quality time with friends.