A North Carolina listener is fond of the German loanword Weltschmerz, literally “world pain,” a compound word made up of Welt, cognate with English world and Schmerz, cognate with smart as in That smarts! Coined by a 19th-century German author who wrote under the pen name Jean Paul, Weltschmerz originally referred to a sorrow about the world soothed only by imagining a blessed afterlife. Its meaning later broadened to mean a deep, reflective world-weariness, used by such writers as Ralph Ellison in Invisible Man (Bookshop|Amazon). The word sometimes appears in English with a capital W. Jean-Paul also coined the now-familiar doppelgänger, literally a “double goer,” now applied to a second self. This is part of a complete episode.
In Hong Kong English, Add oil! means something like “Go on!” or “Go for it!” A recent addition to the Oxford English Dictionary, this expression of encouragement comes from Cantonese (加油 or gā yáu; rendered as jiāyóu from Mandarin) and draws on the...
A Green Bay Packers fan wonders why a quarterback who’s tackled is said to be sacked. The roots of the word sack as in “bag” goes back thousands of years, all the way to Akkadian, later spreading through Greek, Latin, and then to Romance and...
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