Weekly Prompt: The World Wide Word
Stealing words worldwide
Welcome to the second weekly challenge for July, where the theme is Expand Your Vocabulary.
Last week, we looked at Olde English, but this week we are diving into modern non-English. These days, there are a bewildering array of words that we use that just don’t look English. In fact, they aren’t English. Never were English, and never will truly be English. But they easily convey something — a feeling, a thought, something — that isn’t easily expressed within the limits of the traditional language.
Schadenfreude may be the most recognizable of these words. It is defined as:
pleasure derived by someone from another person’s misfortune
This is definitely a guilty pleasure, but a pleasure nonetheless. We all get some pleasure from seeing people fail, and they get pleasure from seeing us fail. It’s unfortunately true. While you can attempt to raise your soul above such pettiness, it always seems to creep back in. Never banished forever.
For our challenge this week, I am going to cherry-pick some of these words from other languages (not just German), and you are going to write a story where the word is indispensable in the telling of the story.
Challenge Requirements
Your story must:
- Use at least one of the following words correctly Razbliuto Yūgen Schlimazl Fisselig Shouganai Waldeinsamkeit
- Be exactly 200 words long, excluding the title, subtitle, and any post-story bio/links. (We use Medium’s own word count feature.)
- Be fictional, even if it includes factual information or concerns.
- Use “words” as one of your five tags.
Challenge Example
As with last week, for an example of the challenge, I choose a word NOT on the list — Saudade.
(in Portuguese folk culture) a deep emotional state of melancholic longing for a person or thing that is absent
You may not understand what the words mean right now, but Google is your friend.
To ease your googling efforts, I stole all of these words from this article
Enjoy this trip to the new English, and write, write, write.