It usually gets it brief moment in the sun every spring during the National Spelling Bee, where it is one of the more difficult words that gets spelled in competition. ![]() ![]() Our earliest use of it in print is from the Edinburgh Review in 1845: “His mind is both clear and strong, free from schwärmerei, (a word untranslatable, because the thing itself is un-English,) free from cant and affectation of all kinds.” Once Schwärmerei came into English, it lost the umlaut and the initial capital that marked it as a German word and became schwarmerei. Ironically, it wasn’t a particularly welcome word when it first appeared in English. ![]() In time, both schwärmen and Schwärmerei came to refer to any enthusiastic activity or feeling. Schwarmerei ultimately comes from the German verb schwärmen, which means “to swarm.” When Schwärmerei (with the umlaut) first appeared in German as a noun, it referred to the frenzied activity of bees swarming. The word refers to excessive and unbridled enthusiasm or sentiment. But unlike other German loanwords, schwarmerei isn’t all doom and gloom. Though less common in English prose than many of the other words on this list, schwarmerei is another word we’ve co-opted from German. “Boy,” he marvels, “those Germans have a word for everything.” After that episode aired, we saw a steady increase in the written use of schadenfreude in English. In an episode that aired in October, 1991, Lisa explains what schadenfreude is to Homer, who is gloating at his neighbor’s failure. Schadenfreude was favored mostly among English-speaking academics until the early 1990s, when it was introduced to more general audiences by The Simpsons. In short, the feeling was unworthy, and therefore so was the word. Why the late adoption into English? Early citations for the word in English indicate that schadenfreude was thought to be a shameful defect first of Germans, and then of humanity in general. It was popular in Germany: discussed by Schopenhauer, Kant, and Nietzsche, as well as used by Goethe, schadenfreude shows up in psychology books, literature for children, and critical theory for over 100 years before it appears in English. It’s a compound of the German noun Schaden, which means “damage,” and freude, which means “joy.” We know that the word was in use in the mid-1700s in Germany, where it appears in a few books with tales intended for children. That broad smile on your face as you pass the scene is a result of schadenfreude.Ī popular lookup on our site, schadenfreude is a noun that refers to the joy you might feel at another person’s pain. Five minutes and one mile down the road, you see flashing lights: the jerk’s been pulled over for reckless driving. ![]() They race up behind you and nearly rear-end you, then speed off up the shoulder. Cutting people off, riding people’s bumpers, even splitting the lane to get mere feet ahead of everyone else. There’s this jerk who’s weaving in and out of stop-and-go traffic in bursts of 50 mph. Weltschmerz was borrowed into English in the 1860s and while it has lost its direct tie to 19th-century Romanticism, it does retain a bit of the formality of its original uses. The word was popularized by Heinrich Heine not long after, who moved the word’s meaning away from active loathing and toward sentimental apathy. It was coined by the author Jean Paul-born Johann Paul Friedrich Richter-in his novel Selina, where he used it to refer to Lord Byron’s disaffected loathing for the world. Weltschmerz, or literally “world-pain” or “world-weariness,” first appeared in German in 1827 and was born out of the melancholy and pessimistic Romantic literary movement taking place in Germany at the time. “Werner Herzog, who understands more than just about anyone the terror of a cold and irrational universe, got some mileage out of remaking Nosferatu in 1979 by keeping what worked in the novel and in Murnau’s 1922 film and leaning heavily into the vampire’s weltschmerz.”Ī feeling of sentimental sadness or pessimism the weariness that comes with knowing that the world is going to let you down no matter what and there’s nothing you can do to stop it: this is what the Germans succinctly call Weltschmerz.
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