WOTY candidate: schadenfreude

[Laurence Horn]

Would an embarrassing new revelation about the 
founder of psychoanalysis give the rest of us 
Sigmun(d)freude or Freudenfreude?

On a related (to WOTY) topic, though, nobody's 
mentioned the front-page NYT article today on 
googlegängers, with a reference to its anointment 
it as our Most Creative WOTY:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/10/us/10names.html?_r=1&scp=8&sq=google&st=nyt&oref=slogin

LH


At 7:53 PM -0400 4/10/08, Benjamin Zimmer wrote:
>On Thu, Apr 10, 2008 at 6:12 PM, JAMES A. LANDAU wrote:
>>
>>
>>  WOTY candidate: "schadenfreude".  It's been 
>>around for a while (MWCD10 says 1895) but in the
>>  last month it has emerged from obscurity into 
>>numerous news stories. (about 1,250,000 hits on
>>  Google) In fact I even found a pun on the word:
>>
>>  http://www.economist.com/world/na/displaystory.cfm?story_id=10961825
>>
>>  "It is hardly surprising, then, that the 
>>country is enjoying a fit of Spitzenfreude-and 
>>that
>>  Wall Street's trading floors are decorated 
>>with photoshopped pictures of him cavorting with
>>  bodacious babes in various states of undress. 
>>Some people have even attributed the
>>  markets' mid-week bounce to glee over Mr 
>>Spitzer, rather than to the $200 billion 
>>shovelled
>>  their way by the Fed."
>
>Xenfreude (where X = a politician's name) is hardly a new innovation.
>See my Language Log post mentioning Bushenfreude, Deanenfreude,
>Frankenfreude, etc.:
>
>http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/003994.html
>
>And Mark Liberman's more recent post on Huckenfreude, Mittenfreude,
>Obamenfreude, etc.:
>
>http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/005296.html
>
>And finally on the popularity of the word "schadenfreude", see my
>OUPblog post from last year:
>
>http://blog.oup.com/2007/09/schadenfreude/
>.
>
>--Ben Zimmer
>
>------------------------------------------------------------
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The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org