Cry And The World Laughs With You…
What a fearful thing is it that any language should have a word expressive of the pleasure which men feel at the calamities of others; for the existence of the word bears testimony to the existence of the thing. And yet in more than one such a word is found.
These words speak volumes about the human condition and about the outer fringe boundaries of our attitude, behavior, and treatment of each other. I also found it somewhat troubling that none of the online reverse dictionaries or thesauri yielded even one hint of a word for the opposite of schadenfreude, which would mean unbridled joy for the fortunes of others. Sure, we can describe the flip-side with a phrase, but apparently not a single word. Since schadenfreude is from High German, perhaps there is an antonym in German. Dr. Stu?
10 Comments so far
German is great that way–as are many other languages (New Testament Greek and Old Testament Hebrew come to mind, and I invite you to ponder the implications of that for translating Western culture’s most important book)–for conveying in single words fairly complex emotions or ideas. English, on its own, lacks that capacity because its tendency is to be very precise in delineating subtle distinctions within an idea or concept–”shades of meaning.” In class last night, during a discussion of description in writing, we quickly came up with almost 2 dozen very different ways to say “angry”–none of them obscene.
Many years ago, I read that English is an ideal language for science and commerce because of those qualities; German is ideal for philosophy and theology–schadenfreude’s existence is symptomatic of that, it seems to me; the Romance languages for, um, romance.
Yammer, yammer. All this is a long way of saying, Good post. Thanks.
Interesting word and thought to ponder– the above comment likewise
Perhaps some languages from the Buddist world would be a good place to look for shadenfreude’s opposite. The Dali Lama assumes we humans have an essetially gentle nature whose purpose is to seek happiness from positive emotions.
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I don’t see why you think Bush, Chaney, and McCain are Schadenfreude at all. I see no evidence that they enjoy other’s suffering.
On the other hand, Kennedy, Clinton(s), Perosi, Reid, Obama, Boxer, and many others DO enjoy watching people suffer. They take a working man’s money by force to send on their socialistic government programs and silly things like “global warming”. They want to garnish our wages to pay for socialized medicine where it will be a crime if you go to a doctor of YOUR choice.
That seems pretty brutal and cruel to me. But the left seems to really enjoy punishing the achievers.
That is a sad reflection and one I hadn’t considered before.
We’re all born selfish to some extent (even subconsciously to ensure the survival of our line/species) and it’s from our self-centredness that we delight in other’s misfortunes and can’t quite totally thrill to their good fortunes. (Except perhaps our children’s - which, could be said, reflects on us!)
At least I can’t!
I tend to use a generalisation as the antonym :
Lebenslust = a joyful lust for life.
That doesn’t apply to specific people though
I suppose the nearest English word to Schadensfreude is Floccipaucinihilifilification, which is incidentally the longest word not containing an E, and thus a good one to throw into cryptographic decoding exercises [evil_grin]
Oops, typo alarm : the second F should be a P
With all of the reorganization going on around here, schadenfreude’s been rampant, especially among folks on the outside who were/are hoping certain heads would roll (mine, included). And that leads me to the best schadenfreude song of all time (which has been running though my mind a lot lately): “Smiling faces, sometimes, pretend to be yo’ friend (can ya’ dig it?). . .”
Though my Nashville-born daddy didn’t use the word schadenfreude to describe Lyndon Johnson’s feelings about the death of Kennedy, he did say it was “like your mother-in-law running off a cliff in your new Cadillac.” Schadenfreude (with a twist).
Correction: Melanie tells me the German antonym of Schadenfreude is goennerhaft (adjective), which I would translate as a noun into wellwisher.