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.
Susie Dent’s murder mystery Guilty by Definition (Bookshop|Amazon) follows a lexicographer in Oxford who becomes a sleuth of a different kind, seeking the culprit in a long-unsolved killing. A lexicographer herself, Dent includes lots of obscure and...
Mona from Riverview, Florida, grew up understanding that the word schmooze, which comes from Yiddish, meant simply “to mingle and chat” at parties, but when she fondly referred to her friend as a schmoozer, the friend was insulted, assuming that a...
