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November 1, 2004
TT: More on the "S" word
My posting on schadenfreude pulled a lot of e-mail.A Los Angeles cabaret singer wrote:
Just a theory: you are, of course, aware that there is a song in the Sesame Street parody musical Avenue Q called "Schadenfreude." Perhaps our friends at the Times think that is reason enough to suspect it is now part of the popular lexicon. (They did the same thing a couple of years back with "tsunami," if you recall.)
She was the first to remind me of what I should have known, seeing as how I gushed all over Avenue Q in The Wall Street Journal last year. Several others wrote immediately thereafter to point out the same thing, including a New York actress:
Last October, I came across the word for the first time in my "Word Of The Day" calendar (it was a gift!) and took special notice of it because this calendar had, up until then, had the habit of introducing me to such exotic and challenging terms as "espresso" and "pseudonym." Here, at last, was a word I hadn't seen before.
Two nights later, I went to see "Avenue Q" on Broadway and Voila! there was the word as the title of a song!
Since then, I can't stop seeing the thing and I've never quite decided if it was always used so much or if I just noticed it more because of my handy calendar. Maybe I missed out on not having one for 2004. Probably not.
Oh, so the theory is, maybe the show affected a bunch of people or maybe a lot of those calendars were on sale.
Minutes later, I heard from the polyglot critic Bruce Bawer, an old friend who follows this blog from his home in Norway:
Interestingly, of the other Germanic languages I'm familiar with, Norwegian and Danish also have a word for this concept ("skadefryd"), as does Swedish ("skadeglädje"). In Dutch, the equivalent word would be "schadevreugde," but I don't find it in my Dutch-English dictionary, and when I google it, only one instance of it turns up (in a posting on Monty Python's The Meaning of Life, which is described as having "well brought out schadevreugde as in the Pink Panther movies"). It's interesting that English, the most word-rich of all the Germanic languages, doesn't have a word for this. Does this tell us anything, perhaps, about Anglo-Saxon culture or the Anglo-Saxon character?
At least in Norway, the word in question is by no means obscure or academic. I have actually heard "skadefryd" used several times in conversation since moving to Norway. The first time I heard it, it took me a second or two to realize it was "Schadenfreude" with a Norwegian accent. I was delighted to realize Norwegian actually had its very own word for the concept. It has been a bit disconcerting, however, to see just how often the word comes up.
My own theory is that the redistributionist welfare state engenders an excessive concern with, and envy of, what others have - not just money but talent, looks, health, love, happiness, anything – so that when somebody has "too much" of something and suddenly loses it, skadefryd is inevitable. (Just a theory.)
All of which is further proof that I have the smartest readers in the known universe.
Posted November 1, 2004 12:03 PM
