“Eat Your Words”

Schadenfreude: n. pleasure derived by someone from another person’s misfortune.
Origin: German

It’s a word nonexistent in the English language; one described by the conglomeration of ideas bundled into one sentence to make sense to us.

I’m sitting at the dinner table next to my German mother. We’re eating chicken wings and fennel salad with blood oranges. When we go to Germany, we eat Spätzle (a traditional Schwäbisch egg noodle) cooked by my mother’s sister who speaks just a few words of English. Then I have more time to eat because I have less to say; I can’t speak German. The Americans at the table eat and nod as my mother translates her Schwäbisch dialect into lightly accented English—an accent I cannot detect but others claim exists in subtleties. As German and English overlap at the table and unravel into tender tones both languages unite into a kind of mishmash made up of table talk.

So much of life is about food and words and the words we use are measured out in our immeasurable teaspoons coated with saliva.

Why don’t I speak German? When we don’t know a language we lose a culture with all of its banalities and colloquialisms. What gets lost between the cracks? In a conversation, we build upon our understandings, misunderstandings, miscommunications, and somehow we fall back into some kind of understanding again. We have a desire to comprehend, but don’t we all want to lose ourselves, just a little bit, in someone else’s words?

We don’t have a word for “Schadenfreude” but we understand the summation of it roughly with its intimacies subtracted. How do we choose new words? What gives them meaning? When we don’t speak a language, how do we make our meaning out of foreign sounds?

We speak. We eat. We sleep. We repeat. We treat words like food—we try them, wet them with our tongues, digest and remember them until we stack them somewhere in our bodies where the knowns and unknowns come to rest.

As we say in America, the proof is in the pudding.

–Camille Dourmashkin-Cagol