"Martha Stewart's statements on the courthouse steps after her sentencing last Friday unleashed a whole new round of schadenfreude."
"Hence, I felt a certain perverse schadenfreude as I wondered exactly how the hero was going to fix (or, more likely, foul up) his current life."
"A highly specific strain of fire schadenfreude -- hoping for the worst in some distant forest because it is best for one's immediate family and friends -- is endemic on this and many other reservations."
To hear the media -- including The Washington Post, in which the preceding three sentences appeared in the last few weeks -- tell it, America is brimming over with schadenfreude.
But unless you're that guy who keeps winning on "Jeopardy," maybe you don't quite know what "schadenfreude" means. Is it a newly fashionable breed of dog? Starbucks's latest frozen concoction? Something contagious?
Schadenfreude (pronounced SHAHD-n-froy-duh) is the German term for malicious pleasure taken in another person's misery. And according to those who have studied the sensation, it's something almost all of us feel now and again, secretly smirking when a colleague gets passed over for promotion or crowing aloud when a preening politician gets sent to the slammer. Like it or not, schadenfreude -- in German, "schaden" means "damage," and "freude" means "joy" -- is part of the human condition.
Oddly, for all the schadenfreude we Americans evidently exude -- the word has appeared in nearly 300 U.S. newspaper articles in the past year -- the English language has no word for the phenomenon. (Note to selves: If we do come up with one, let's make it easier to spell.)
Still, we have it in spades, aiming it in recent months at such public scorn magnets as the felonious home ec mogul Stewart, the spendthrift Tyco CEO Dennis Kozlowski, the house-of-cards players at Enron, the deceitful conglomerateur Bernie Ebbers of the late WorldCom, conservative commentator and painkiller addict Rush Limbaugh, the broke and battered boxer Mike Tyson and dictator-turned-dunghole-dweller Saddam Hussein.
Schadenfreude even plays a role in the success of popular television shows like "Survivor," where players are exiled for their failures or their sins, and "The Apprentice," which hinges on viewers' desire to witness the moment when the most arrogant Donald Trump sycophant gets told, "You're fired."
No need a person be real to be the object of schadenfreude: Many of world's great literary works -- "King Lear," for instance -- and some of our most enduringly popular movies -- like "Citizen Kane" -- feed the audience's desire to see the mighty brought to heel.
