Building a Better Vocabulary

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Latin aqua vitae.

ż Banzai, NDUDRNH, and tycoon come from Japanese, and Sanskrit

gave us NDUPD, nirvana, yoga, and shampoo.

ż Finally, high school students probably remain annoyed at

Arabic for giving us algebra.

z This relatively short list gives us a sense of the sponge-like quality

of English, soaking up words from just about everywhere. As a

result, our language has an incredibly rich vocabulary and allows us

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Schadenfreude (noun)

Satisfaction, pleasure, or malicious joy at someone else’s misfortune.

z Schadenfreude, a German word, came into English in the 19th

century. In German, schaden means “damage, harm, injury,” and

freude means “joy.” Thus, schadenfreude literally means “damage-

joy,” which seems appropriate to describe the secret sense of

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z Of course, English-speaking people have always felt schadenfreude,

but we didn’t have the right word for it. Although there were some

rare English words that were close synonyms for this word, for

some reason, they never caught on. The fact that schadenfreude was

used on an episode of The Simpsons seems to attest to its arrival

in mainstream American culture. Homer, the father in this cartoon,

expresses joy at a rival’s business failing, and his daughter Lisa

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Zeitgeist (noun)

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cultural, and intellectual climate of an era.