Malicious joy

There was a brief item in the Channel 4 News last night about the strikes which are causing chaos in France. It featured the remarks of a lively Frenchwoman who wasn’t pleased about the situation and said so with great vigour, adding that the IOC must be mad to consider holding the Olympic Games in a country where this sort of thing happened.

I wasn’t paying much attention to this until I heard the newsreader, the admirable Samira Ahmed, say that the promoters of London 2012 were reacting to these events with Schadenfreude.

This word is not particularly rare in English – it crops up less often than Zeitgeist, say, though perhaps more often than Weltschmertz – but hearing it used casually and unpretentiously in the news happily confirmed the impression I have had for some time that the evening Channel 4 bulletin stands out among others by assuming that its viewers have rather more than basic literacy.