My posting on schadenfreude pulled a lot of e-mail.
A Los Angeles cabaret singer wrote:
Just a theory: you are, of course, aware that there
is a song in the Sesame Street parody musical Avenue Q
called “Schadenfreude.” Perhaps our friends at the
Times think that is reason enough to suspect it is now
part of the popular lexicon. (They did the same thing
a couple of years back with “tsunami,” if you recall.)
She was the first to remind me of what I should have known, seeing as how I gushed all over Avenue Q in The Wall Street Journal last year. Several others wrote immediately thereafter to point out the same thing, including a New York actress:
Last October, I came across the word for the first time in my “Word Of The Day” calendar (it was a gift!) and took special notice of it because this calendar had, up until then, had the habit of introducing me to such exotic and challenging terms as “espresso” and “pseudonym.” Here, at last, was a word I hadn’t seen before.
Two nights later, I went to see “Avenue Q” on Broadway and Voila! there was the word as the title of a song!
Since then, I can’t stop seeing the thing and I’ve never quite decided if it was always used so much or if I just noticed it more because of my handy calendar. Maybe I missed out on not having one for 2004. Probably not.
Oh, so the theory is, maybe the show affected a bunch of people or maybe a lot of those calendars were on sale.
Minutes later, I heard from the polyglot critic Bruce Bawer, an old friend who follows this blog from his home in Norway:
Interestingly, of the other Germanic languages I’m
familiar with, Norwegian and Danish also have a word for this concept
(“skadefryd”), as does Swedish (“skadegl