Outside Edge: An über language for the Zeitgeist By Frederick Studemann

Schadenfreude is one of those words for which there is no simple direct English equivalent. What in German is a delightful tongue-rolling, lip-stretcher of a word, needs to be ploddingly spelled out as “the delight in the misery of others”.

How fitting that just as most other indicators are pointing downwards, the use of a word that so neatly describes one of the popular feelings of these times is in bullish form. Compound nouns – a German speciality – with their ability to express different things lend themselves to the complex nature of the current crisis.

Schadenfreude is not the only one suited to neatly capturing the Zeitgeist. Angst, which has been doing English service (on and off the couch) for decades is an obvious case – though its usage this year has slipped (down 3 per cent in the UK and 8 per cent in the US). Perhaps we have moved on from plain fear to something far more dramatic – a full-blown Götterdämmerung, maybe? When it comes to expressing volatile market behaviour, try Sturm und Drang.

But it is not just the credit crunch that has offered the chance for some payback. Take über. A handy little prefix that elevates all that follows, über was supposedly brought into English by a combination of George Bernard Shaw and Nietzsche (think übermensch). It has not looked back since. In the UK its appearance in media has risen nearly sixfold in the last decade; in the US fourfold.

In showbusiness anyone who has not earned the title of an über-agent, über-director, über-publicist, or über-whatever should probably be seeking career counselling. In politics, real players are über strategists, those who don’t make the cut “über goobers”. Global warming must be serious: commentators call it the über issue. Leonardo DiCaprio’s house goes on the market not as an ordinary domicile, but as an über home. Finance has not been spared. Market pessimists get to be “über bears”. Warren Buffett is, predictably, the über investor. Über is über all.