WordWacky

I used the word schadenfreude not long ago in an IM conversation regarding Sarah Palin. It was the early days of her addition to the ticket, and I was relishing her scandal, yet simultaneously ashamed of my glee at someone else’s difficulties. Sort of.* The next day, the person I was messaging told me she’d seen that same word multiple times within the last 24 hours in friends’ blog posts. At first I blamed the collective unconscious. Avenue Q was too long ago — even when it finally made it to Seattle — to be a direct influence. Then I realized it was likely Sarah Palin who was making us all feel joyous at another’s pain.

[Editor's note: As I said, this was in the early days of her campaign, when it seemed natural to assume that someone who'd advocated the losing proposition of abstinence-only education would feel saddened when, as expected, it didn't work at all -- even in her own privileged Christian home.]

If you’re not completely clear on the word, or just need some video entertainment, here’s someone’s Disney-altered version of the Avenue Q song, “Schadenfreude.”

Of course, my schadenfreude regarding the Palins was limited to Mom. Toward poor Bristol, I felt something quite opposed to schadenfreude.

Back when I was working in the mental health system, there were strict rules around the use of prefixes, when it came to the client’s feelings, especially their pain. We were allowed to empathize, but never sympathize.

What’s the difference? It’s slim, to be sure, and I would argue that friends can do either, and both, at the same time. But to maintain a professional distance, empathy was required over its fraternal twin, sympathy.

American Heritage defines the prefix em- as:

en- or em- or in-   

1. a. To put into or onto: encapsulate.
    b. To go into or onto: enplane.
2. To cover or provide with: enrobe.
3. To cause to be: endear.
4. Thoroughly. Used often as an intensive: entangle.

While the prefix sym- is:

syn- or sym-   

1. a. Together; with: synecology.
    b. United: syncarp.
    c. Same; similar: sympatric.
    d. At the same time: synesthesia.
2. a. Same; similar: sympatric.
    b. At the same time: synesthesia.

The base of both words is the root, path, which is related to pathos, the quality of evoking compassion or pity. It comes from the Greek, páthos, or suffering.

So if we were to understand the words based on their components, empathy would be to get into a feeling with someone, while sympathy would be to feel it with them, or at the same time. This is pretty close to the meanings of the words. From Dictionary.com:

empathy - (noun)
1. the intellectual identification with or vicarious experiencing of the feelings, thoughts, or attitudes of another. 

sympathy - (noun)
3. the fact or power of sharing the feelings of another, esp. in sorrow or trouble; fellow feeling, compassion, or commiseration.

Still pretty similar ideas, but the clinical distinction was definitely one of distance. To empathize was to imagine how the client felt, while maintaining your own place in the relationship with the client. To sympathize would be to feel it right along with them, for example, perhaps telling stories of when similar things happened to you.

So while I have no sympathy, mere hints of empathy, and some schadenfreude for Mrs. Palin, I do feel some combination of sympathy and empathy for Bristol.

For example, I feel sympathy for her being pregnant for the first time, and aprehensive about what might happen next. I am able to get right in there and feel it along with her, as I am going through the same experience, at least as far as those aspects of it are concerned.

But I am twice Bristol’s age. I have a partner, and my baby was not only planned, but in some sense, engineered. My partner and I are both degreed and employed. Mine and Bristol’s situations are not, in fact, similar enough that I can truly sympathize with her. Yet I can empathize with being too young to make lifelong decisions like marriage and children. I can empathize with having no choice but to go obscenely public with what I will generously call her decision to become a teenage parent.

*Perhaps I should disclaim my schadenfreude, tell you that I am outraged by the McCain campaign’s insertion of a woman — any woman — on the ticket, in the hopes that as a lowly woman I would see no difference between Sarah Palin and Hillary Clinton. Perhaps I should ennumerate all of the ways in which Palin’s ideology is an assault on my life and everything I believe in.

But probably I shouldn’t, since this blog isn’t about politics. It’s about words.

Two word and book related stories made the news in the last week, in which people who do things we all might do – or at least might be tempted to do – were actually caught and booked for their offenses.

The first took place at the Grand Canyon – the crime: conspiracy to vandalize government property.

Two self-styled vigilantes against typos who defaced a more than 60-year-old, hand-painted sign at Grand Canyon National Park were sentenced to probation and banned from national parks for a year. They had removed an extraneous apostrophe and added a comma to the sign.

Jeff Deck and Benjamin Herson pleaded guilty Aug. 11 for the damage done March 28 at the park’s Desert View Watchtower. The sign was made by Mary Elizabeth Jane Colter, the architect who designed the rustic 1930s watchtower and other Grand Canyon-area landmarks.

The second reminds me of my mother, who told me so often that it was burned into my consciousness (perhaps to my own detriment): “There’s no debtors’ prison in this country.” Heidi Dalibor of Grafton, Wisconsin was arrested for not returning her library books, and failing to pay the fine.

Dalibor couldn’t believe the day two Grafton police officers came to her house, armed with an arrest warrant for failing to return library books and a $171 fine.

“We just went to the car and he told me he had to handcuff me. I was a little surprised and told them I didn’t think that was necessary. He said that was procedure, cuffed me, grabbed my head and put me in the car,” Dalibor said. ”

Daliber checked out “Angels and Demons” and “White Oleander”, but never returned them.

[This rogue editor's disclaimer: The above excerpt is quoted exactly as posted -- all errors are the author's, not mine.]

That’s an awfully big smile. Did the photographer prompt her, “Say lawsuit”?

Can you sue the world if you don’t like a word in general use? My instinct says no, but apparently someone is trying.

The people of the island of Lesbos are not pleased. It seems that one famous Lesbian’s sexual activities have trumped the accomplishments of the entire island. No longer can a straight woman from the Greek island say she’s a Lesbian without raising eyebrows. This is the complaint of a lawsuit filed against the Homosexual and Lesbian Community of Greece. [via Deblog]

While the homophobic implications of this are undeniable, I have to say, I empathize for a few reasons.

• I’ve never liked the word, even though I will cop to the identity in certain settings. I prefer to call myself a dyke. It’s hipper, more in-your-face, less apologetic. While I am eternally grateful to the feminist lesbians of earlier generations for doing their absolute best to de-stigmatize the word, I’m not sure it worked. There’s something about the way the way it forms in your mouth that makes it sound a little like a disease, or like you’re trying to spit out a hair caught in the back of your throat. Is this internalized homophobia? Probably. But it’s how I feel, nonetheless, and I’m not alone.
• The activities of certain a soon-to-be-ex-President make me embarrassed to call myself an American. While I won’t equate bombing nations, destroying their infrastructure, claiming their natural resources, and watching the nation’s decline into civil war with, say, cunnilingus, I can understand how one person’s actions should not define that of an entire geographical region.

The man behind the lawsuit, Dimitris Lambrou, also mentions that she wasn’t really a lesbian dyke, anyway. New research (funded by whom, I wonder) has unearthed that Sappho had a family and killed herself over a guy. Two things to say to that: 1) So?, and 2) She should have stuck to women.

Despite my qualified empathy with the plight of the Lesbians, I will enjoy watching this initiative fail. For one thing, there are far more of us than there are of you. Your brand has been co-opted, people of the island of Lesbos.

Sorry?

In middle school we had a sub named Mr. Gliner. He was no ordinary sub. Usually they were nervous and controlling, sometimes angry, too. Mr. Gliner had a disturbingly giddy manner that made him oblivious to all but the worst behavior. Behind his layered glasses, his eyes were tiny blue peas. Mr. Gliner was also missing a couple of fingers on each hand, and he was built lopsided, so that one pant leg dragged under his foot, torn and stringy.

All we ever did with Mr. Gliner were logic and math problems — no matter whom he was replacing — which he handed out at the beginning of class from a stack of papers he plucked from his briefcase. I always believed he paid for those copies himself.

A recent story has surfaced from Pasco County, FL about a far less bizarre substitute teacher, Jim Picula.

Picula was fired for “wizardry.”

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