# English Words That Don't Translate **URL:** \ **Category:** In My Humble Opinion\ **Created:** [July 26, 2015, 7:56am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/english-words-that-dont-translate/726219 "2015-07-26T07:56:07Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 1\ **Page:** 3
**Author:** ![guizot](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/guizot/32/3636_2.png) [@guizot](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/guizot)\ **Post date:** [July 30, 2015, 3:34am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/english-words-that-dont-translate/726219/41 "2015-07-30T03:34:45Z")
> [@John\_Mace](#): > > A question about “schadenfreude”. Is it a compound word (compound words being pretty common in German, and this word being on the longish side)? If so, I’m going to say it doesn’t count\*. It’s rather arbitrary what is considered a word vs a phrase, and if you have a phrase that means the same thing, it’s just a matter of the rules of the language not putting that phrase together into a single word. > > \*Irrespective of whether it is considered an English word now. Good point, which gets back to my earlier point about “X=Y.” The more a chunk of words acquires idiomaticity, the closer it gets to being a lexical unit. Often hyphens get inserted to show that, with adjectives such as _matter-of-fact_, _down-to-earth_, _once-in-a-lifetime_, etc. If another language can express one of these ideas with one word (or a simple compound), does that necessarily mean it “doesn’t translate” into English? Another language might be able to convey the particular connotation of these terms with a single word (and obviously English has single word synonyms, for them, too), but that doesn’t necessarily mean they “don’t translate.” Probably _schadenfreude_, literally “harm-joy,” attracts so much attention because it’s an elliptical and implicative way to say “joy-at-harm-to-others”. But “harm-joy” might easily have become an English equivalent, if German and English-language cultures didn’t have so much interaction. It wouldn’t be much different from terms like _blood lust_, etc. In other words, it could easily have been “translated”–that is, we could have derived a simple term for it–but for whatever reason we use the original–which, as **Waymore** hints, is another story. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/english-words-that-dont-translate/726219.md?page=2)