Schadenfreude Schadenfreude Schadenfreude (; ; 'harm-joy') is the experience of pleasure, joy, or self-satisfaction that comes from learning of or witnessing the troubles, failures, or humiliation of another. It is one of four related emotions or concepts. Schadenfreude is a complex negative emotion. Rather than feeling sympathy towards someone's misfortune, schadenfreude evokes joyful feelings that take pleasure from watching someone fail. This emotion is displayed more in children than adults, however adults also experience schadenfreude, they are just better at concealing their expressions. "Schadenfreude" is borrowed from German; it is a compound of "Schaden", "damage, harm", and "Freude", "joy". The German
Ghost word word" refers to coining a new word implied logically from a real word, often etymologically incorrectly. The correct term for such a derivation is back-formation, a word that has been established since the late 19th century. An example is "beforemath" which is derived from "aftermath". A back-formation cannot become a ghost word; as a rule it would clash with Skeat's precise definition, which requires that the word forms have "no meaning". Ghost words and similar errors and creations, certainly including back-formations, usually are at least troublesome to philologists as a source of neologisms and linguistic confusion. More philosophically, one might