niceness

[Brian MacWhinney]

Jane,
   Good point.  However, my claim was a bit more narrow.  I was not
suggesting that English is in any way "nice", only that it avoids this
particular verbal show of pleasure in other's suffering.  English accepts
the notion of "sadism", but only as a foreign import.  English is rich, of
course, in terms describing moral violations like greed, sloth, cowardice
(the basic sins of Pilgrim's Progress).  It is also definitely OK to talk
openly about vindictiveness and revenge (witness Timothy McVeigh on the
subject of revenge for the Waco FBI attack).  These emotional terms are
justified by their grounding in righteousness.  But it is exactly this that
forces us to shift (almost at the last moment?) from feeling
"Schadenfreude" to concluding that someone "got his just desserts".  In
fact, what happens is that the wrath (vindictiveness, vengefulness) of the
Almighty ends up descending onto an appropriate target without us having to
develop a personal relation grounded on the joy of seeing someone else
suffer.  Tricky stuff.
   Does Lakoff have anything on issues like this?  English has lots of
stuff like "writhing in agony" and "twisting in the wind."  Are there
metaphors and similes in Schadenfreude languages grounded on "delight in
watching someone twist in the wind?"
    Alternatively, perhaps there is some universal of metaphor that
excludes emotions about others' emotions.  Maybe such terms are just too
cognitively complex according to some version of "theory of mind."    What
about Akio Kamio's analyses that claim that Japanese limits the speaker's
ability to make statements about the hearer's feelings and emotions
(speaker's territory of knowledge)?  Perhaps we could argue that English is
constrained in a similar way.  I realize that this is not the original
account that I offered, but it is also an interesting possibility.

-- Brian