You May Remember Mickey Came Home,

and the very next day I saw this,

I burst into a bout of schadenfreude, I just could not help it, the chances of winning a Mickey must be so small, and then to have Pluto scupper your win must be even smaller, but there it is, to see more unfortunate mishaps have a look here, if you are prone to bouts of schadenfreude remember to put your coffee/tea down before looking! in case you are wondering, although schadenfreude is a German word the feeling does surface in other languages and cultures, it is just a fact of life that the English language does not have a equivalent, for instance the Japanese have a saying: “The misfortune of others tastes like honey.” The French speak of joie maligne, a diabolical delight in other people’s suffering. In Danish it is skadefryd; in Hebrew, simcha la-ed; in Mandarin, xìng-zāi-lè-huò; in Russian, zloradstvo; and for the Melanesians who live on the remote Nissan Atoll in Papua New Guinea, it is banbanam. Two millennia ago, the Romans spoke of malevolentia. Earlier still, the Greeks described epichairekakia (literally epi, over, chairo, rejoice, kakia, disgrace). A study in Würzburg in Germany carried out in 2015 found that football fans smiled more quickly and broadly when their rival team missed a penalty, than when their own team scored. “To see others suffer does one good,” wrote the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. “This is a hard saying, but a mighty, human, all-too-human principle.”

There has never really been a word for these grubby delights in English. In the 1500s, someone attempted to introduce “epicaricacy” from the ancient Greek, but it didn’t catch on. There could only be one conclusion: as a journalist in the Spectator asserted in 1926, “There is no English word for schadenfreude because there is no such feeling here.” He was wrong, of course.