Ya know, about ten years ago I signed up to m-w.com’s E-mail a day list.
Over the years I slowly but surely turned into a word junkie. I love adding new words to my vocabulary. Funny thing is tho’, every time I learn a new word I haven’t heard before, it seems like I start noticing that word being used everywhere. I mostly attribute this phenomenon due to the fact that now that any given word is added to my vocabulary; my senses are more keen to it being used.
But schadenfreude? Why on this board alone I’ve noticed this word being used ten fold. I first learned this word watching “Boston Legal”. Now, it seems like it’s being used everywhere.
Many fans of the Simpsons recognize this word (thanks to one of Lisa’s quips during a long-ago episode)*. I have no doubt that part of its popularity (at least on this board) relates to that.
I learned this word on “Boston Legal” and have noticed it’s being used a lot since then, too.
It seems weird that this would happen, because in the scene where Alan used the word, he didn’t just use it – he explained its meaning to the jury. I don’t think that would have worked if most people knew the meaning of the word already. They would be thinking, “Excuse me, why are you giving me a pedantic lecture on the meaning of a word that everyone knows?” I thought the scene worked because it was not a common word.
I’m pretty sure Schadenfreude was popularised in Britain in the 80s, well before The Simpsons, thanks to a TV commercial featuring, IIRC, Kevin McNally (Pirates of the Caribbean, innumerable British TV shows). The advert was all about this word that the German language has but English doesn’t. It made quite an impression, and I distinctly remember people starting to use the word after that. I’m damned if I can remember what the ad was for, but it was a long time ago. British Gas?
I learned it in Germany in the 1980s from Germans who pointed out that it was a German word which had no correlation in English. Now my kids use it.
On a similar note, I really hate it when I learn something from reading and then everybody else in the world learns it from something on TV. And then they tell me about it.
I learnt it in school I think, so I must have been under 16. That was ten years ago. I do not recall seeing it frequently on this board either recently or in the few years I’ve been reading here. Maybe because I am not sensitive to it as I have known the word for ages.
I do not like the word defenestrate. I don’t know why!
If it means “per se” will die a violent death, then I will get…how you say?..a feeling of perverse secondary pleasure witnessing the misfortune of that terribly misused and overdone phrase as it disappears from consciousness.