Yet more angst of lack of words for X

[Benjamin Barrett]

I started wondering whether wordies did pick up epicaricacy because it's on word lists without English equivalents.

Other than 1955, which appears to be fabricated as a way to sell a book, the earliest citation after the eighteenth century Wiktionary has is 2004, followed by citations in 2007 and 2008.

On alt.support.menopause (http://bit.ly/XAFTfh), user "Chakolate" says they found epicaricacy on onelook.com as the Latinate English equivalent to Schadenfreude. 

Schadenfreude, BTW, got a huge bump in popularization in 1991 of "When Flanders Failed" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/When_Flanders_Failed), a Simpson's episode. That's quite a bit of time before 2004, but perhaps the accretion of schadenfreude uses in rerun viewers' brains reached a critical point that laid the groundwork for epicaricacy.

Very relevant to the untranslatability theory, on October 11, 2006, user "Top Poster" says on alt.tv.lost (http://bit.ly/1tmbhJ3):

-----
I was making a joke becaue [sic] schadenfreude has been the magic word of the day lately, and all the boneheads who use it heard it from someone else who told them "there is no english equivalent."  However, I should note that there IS, in fact, an english equivalent: epicaricacy
-----

Benjamin Barrett
Formerly of Seattle, WA

Learn Ainu! https://sites.google.com/site/aynuitak1/home

On Aug 19, 2014, at 1:52 PM, Jonathan Lighter <wuxxmupp2000 at GMAIL.COM> wrote:

> In fact the 1621 example isn't English, but Greek.
> 
> Looks like the English word may have been coined in 1955 and the cyberworld
> has recently discovered it.
> 
> Coined presumably because "Schadenfreude" was untranslatable in English.
> 
> JL
> 
> 
> On Tue, Aug 19, 2014 at 4:42 PM, Benjamin Barrett <gogaku at ix.netcom.com>
> wrote:
> 
>> ---------------------- Information from the mail header
>> -----------------------
>> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
>> Poster:       Benjamin Barrett <gogaku at IX.NETCOM.COM>
>> Subject:      Re: Yet more angst of lack of words for X
>> 
>> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>> 
>> Wiktionary (https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Citations:epicaricacy) has =
>> citations over the past decade, plus
>> =E1=BC=90=CF=80=CE=B9=CF=87=CE=B1=CE=B9=
>> =CF=81=CE=B5=CE=BA=CE=B1=CE=BA=CE=AF=CE=B1 in English in 1621 and a =
>> mention of epicaricacy in 1955. (On Wiktionary, mention of a word is =
>> treated differently from use of a word.) BB
>> 
>> On Aug 19, 2014, at 1:06 PM, Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at yale.edu> =
>> wrote:
>> 
>>> =20
>>> =20
>>> On Aug 19, 2014, at 3:37 PM, victor steinbok wrote:
>>> =20
>>>> This one a bit more reasonable than most -- almost contrarian to
>>>> "conventional wisdom".
>>>> =3D20
>>>> http://goo.gl/X5jRD4
>>>> =3D20
>>>> The punchline should be revealing:
>>>> =3D20
>>>>> I'm still looking for one more ... a word for the mistaken belief =3D
>>> that
>>>> there is no English equivalent for a non-English word, such as
>>>> Schadenfreude, which many people believe doesn't translate, but which =
>> =3D
>>> of
>>>> course simply means epicaricacy. Suggestions welcome.
>>>> =3D20
>>> =20
>>> "Epicaricacy", a new one on me, does show up via Googling with the =3D
>>> relevant gloss, but isn't in the OED, and dictionary.com thought I =
>> must =3D
>>> have meant "epicranium".
>>> =20
>>> LH
>> 

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