Happy Monday! 👋
I hope your week is off to a great start.
Before we get into this email, quick question: have you ever watched someone confidently walk into a glass door and felt, just for a split second, absolutely delighted?
No injury. Just the pure comedy of it. And then immediately felt a little guilty for enjoying it.
You don't need to feel guilty. You just need to know the German word for it.
Let's get into it!
Language: German. "Schadenfreude" (SHAH-den-froy-deh)
Meaning: Schadenfreude is the pleasure you feel at someone else's misfortune. Not malicious pleasure. Not cruelty. Just that involuntary flicker of amusement or satisfaction when someone else stumbles, fails, or gets their comeuppance.
In English, we might say:
"I know I shouldn't laugh but..."
"Serves them right."
"I feel terrible for finding this funny."
German skips the guilt and names the feeling directly: Schadenfreude.
Why it's fascinating:
The word combines Schaden (damage or harm) and Freude (joy). Harm-joy. German is nothing if not direct.
It's one of the few German loanwords that English has adopted wholesale, because English simply has no equivalent. It entered English dictionaries in the 1800s and has been there ever since.
Neuroscientists have actually studied schadenfreude in brain imaging labs. When participants watched someone they considered arrogant or undeserving receive bad news, the brain's reward circuits lit up, the same regions activated by food, music, and social bonding. The feeling is real, measurable, and almost universal.
In other words: it's envy's quiet little laugh when the universe corrects itself.
Example:
Als der Chef stolperte, konnte ich meine Schadenfreude kaum verbergen.
"When the boss tripped, I could barely hide my schadenfreude."
Njerep: The Language With Four Known Speakers
On the Mambila Plateau in northeastern Nigeria, there is a language called Njerep.
As of the last documented count, it has four known speakers. All of them are elderly. The community around them shifted to Mambila, the dominant regional language, across the 20th century. Njerep simply stopped being passed down.
Four people. One language. A grammar, a sound system, a vocabulary, and centuries of oral knowledge, held entirely between four people who may not even see each other regularly.
Njerep is a Bantoid language, part of the vast Niger-Congo family that spans much of sub-Saharan Africa. But it has enough distinct features that linguists consider it its own branch. When it goes, something genuinely irreplaceable goes with it.
There is no Njerep dictionary. No grammar textbook. Very limited recordings. Most of what exists lives only in four heads, in a plateau in Nigeria, right now.
The world's oldest surviving piece of writing is not a poem, a prayer, or a philosophical text.
It's a receipt.
The Kushim tablet, a Sumerian clay tablet from around 3100 BCE, records the delivery of barley and malt to a brewery. It lists quantities, names a recipient, and is essentially an ancient administrative record. Humanity's first written document was paperwork.
The second-oldest texts are similarly mundane: grain tallies, livestock counts, and ration lists. Writing wasn't invented to capture stories or ideas. It was invented because someone needed to track who owed what to whom.
The great epics, the philosophy, the poetry — all of that came later. First came accounting.
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What's your favourite example of schadenfreude? The guiltier the better. Hit reply, I read every single one.
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