#7: Þórðargleði

English is a strange language. Even the most restrictive estimates put our lexicon at over a quarter of a million words, and if one were to add scientific jargon, slang, and dialectal words, that number would skyrocket even further.  Although it's hard to quantify, most experts agree that English has one of the largest sets of vocabulary (and, in all likelihood, the largest) of any language currently spoken. And yet, there are so many things that we don't have a word for, and for these things we are forced to either make use of clumsy phrases or steal outright from other languages. The German Schadenfreude is the most well-known of these stolen "untranslatable" words; it describes pleasure derived from someone else's misery. And while it's a perfectly fine word, German is not the only language to have put a name to this phenomenon. Icelandic has a word for it too, and it's þórðargleði.

Now, I have nothing against the German language; it's a very useful one to know (especially in academia... or Germany, I suppose), and it's definitely good at inventing words for unique situations that other languages would struggle to describe. But, this is an Icelandic blog, so I want to take the spotlight off of Schadenfreude for a moment and shine it on þórðargleði, because I think it's actually the better of the two terms. Why, you ask? Well, first of all I'm obviously biased (have I mentioned that I like Icelandic yet?). But, more objectively, the etymology of Schadenfreude is pretty simple (it's a compound of Schaden, harm, and Freude, joy) whereas þórðargleði has more of a story behind it.

Literally, þórðargleði means "the joy of Þórður," and the origin of the term is described in a biography of the reverend Árni Þórarinsson written by the famous Icelandic author Þórbergur Þórðarson between 1945 and 1950. According to the story, the good reverend invented the word after witnessing his laborer Þórður take great pleasure in witnessing rain dampen (and subsequently ruin) the dry bales of hay owned by their neighbor to the north. Árni noted that, while there was a Danish word for Þórður's actions (skadefryd, adapted from German), there was no Icelandic equivalent. And thus þórðargleði was born.

And it stuck; it's still used in Iceland, where loanwords like Schadenfreude are typically discouraged. I think it's time we brought it into English too; German borrowings are so yesterday.

WORD SUMMARY:

þórðargleði (f, indeclinable): schadenfreude (pleasure from someone else's misfortune)

Posted in: Abstract, Compound Words, Nouns, Untranslatable