Hallo, mein schatz, and willkommen to another Deutsch installment of An Assemblage of Grandiose and Bombastic Grandiloquents! That’s right, my klein strudels, we are off to Germany for today’s word: Fremdschämen.
Fremdschämen, is an informal German word meaning ‘to feel ashamed about something someone else has done; to be embarrassed because someone else has embarrassed himself, and doesn’t notice’. In other words, it’s embarrassment on behalf of another person. An example of Fremdschämen would be when your best friend’s mother struts it out in public in her new mini skirt, but doesn’t realise she has the back tucked into her underwear. Awkward.
Fremdschämen comes from the words ‘fremd’, meaning ‘strange’ and ‘schamen’ meaning ‘to be ashamed or embarrassed’. Therefore: to be ashamed or embarrassed for something strange to me. Others relate it to the English word ‘cringeworthy’. There is also a Finnish word, Myötähäpeä, that means ‘secondhand embarrassment’.
It is also often compared to the rather famous German word ‘Schadenfreude’, which means ‘taking joy in somebody else’s pain or misfortune’, though Schadenfreude certainly implies a slightly more vindictive tone. A shorter English translation is ‘malicious pleasure’, so it’s the enjoyment of someone’s embarrassment, rather than feeling the shame yourself.
Schadenfreude comes from the words ‘schaden’, meaning ‘harm’ and ‘freude’ meaning ‘joy’, so the literal translation would be ‘harm-joy’. You might recognise it from the Tony Award winning musical ‘Avenue Q’, which has an entire song devoted to the word. This may have led to the word’s increased popularity from the early 2000s onwards.
If we take it back a little further, Aristotle’s ‘Nicomachean Ethics’ used ‘epikhairekakia’ as part of a triad of terms, in which epikhairekakia stands as the opposite of phthonos, and nemesis occupies the mean. Nemesis is ‘a painful response to another's undeserved good fortune’, while phthonos is a painful response to any good fortune, deserved or not. The epikhairekakos person takes pleasure in another's ill fortune.
Isn’t language wonderful?
Written by Taylor Davidson, Read by Zane C Weber
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