Schadenfreude

Meaning: Feeling happy at other people’s troubles or failures.

Schadenfreude: hard to say and even harder to spell. But it sums up what most of us have felt at some point, that deliciously evil, gleeful feeling you get when something bad happens to someone else. Like pointing and laughing when your friend falls over. Or just feeling all warm and dry indoors while watching people running from the rain outside.

The hit stage musical Avenue Q puts it brilliantly in their song, ‘Schadenfreude’:

The word comes from the German language; a literal translation of it would be ‘harm-joy’. Not everyone likes the idea of it though. The Bible thinks it’s wrong, and the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer thinks it’s ‘diabolic’. Others just think it’s just pure human nature, and we can’t really help it.

There is no word in English that means exactly the same thing, but a very similar phrase would be ‘Roman holiday’.

Why ‘Roman holiday’? Most etymologists think that ‘Roman holiday’ comes from a phrase in Lord George Byron’s 1818 poem, “Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage”. It refers to holidays set aside in ancient Roman times, just for people to enjoy gladiator fights – the blood, gore and of course, deaths.

But where his rude hut by the Danube lay
There were his young barbarians all at play,
There was their Dacian mother. He, their sire,
Butcher’d to make a Roman holiday!

It sounds horrible, but judging by how much people enjoy watching professional wrestling and MMA, I guess we haven’t really changed all that much!

Find out more through these links:
Online Etymology Dictionary
Wikipedia
healthguidance.org: What Is Schadenfreude? Why We’re All a Little Sick in the Head…