1. Schadenfreude. f. Für libitinariorum vota (Seneca, De beneficiis 6, 38, 4) sagt Ostermann 1591 Voc. Anal. 15 Schadenfrewd. Schadenfroh schon bei Barth. Weiberspiegel (Leipz. 1565) M 8ª. K. Heisig in Zs. „Eine heilige Kirche“ I 93. [via Friedrich Kluge Etymologisches Wörterbuch der deutschen Sprache, 18. Auflage, Berlin, 1960, p. 631.] 2. Die Anteilnahme der Nebenmenschen an unserem Schicksal ist Schadenfreude, Zudringlichkeit und Besserwisserei in wechselndem Gemisch. [Arthur Schnitzler, Buch der Sprüche und Bedenken] 3. The new lexicographical buzzword was “hard words.” First used in lexicographical jargon by John Baret in his Alvearie (1573), the term was recognized as meaning the new scholarly vocabulary, usually drawn from Latin and Greek, but also from Arabic and Hebrew, which by then had been infiltrating standard English for thirty years. The “hard word” is the “inkhorn term,” now rationalized, accepted, and shorn of its pejorative meaning. “Hard words” were still largely incomprehensible outside the scholarly circles that had taken them from the classics and introduced them to the vernacular, but the difference now was that not only were such words seen as a necessary part of English, but that for all their scholarly background, there was now a mass market eager and willing to take them on. It was for this market that the dictionary makers of the [seventeenth] century, with their series of “hard word” dictionaries, most enthusiastically catered. As Sir James Murray has noted, these words were unknown to, and not to be imbibed from, mother or grandmother.” [Jonathon Green, Chasing the Sun: Dictionary Makers and the Dictionaries They Made, pp.171f.] 4. And speaking of Nathan Bailey’s Universal Etymological English Dictionary, here’s an online abridgment.
Posted by jim at January 6, 2004 05:57 PM