So I have some explaining to do about the origins of the name “jasonfreude.” Let’s start with the German word schadenfreude. Schadenfreude means the enjoyment one feels at the troubles of others. That sounds like a perfect description of most weblogs, right? No one wants to read about what a good day everyone else is having: we want to read about everyone else’s problems. We read these things because we enjoy reading about the struggles of others. Maybe we read them because we enjoy the heroic and insightful ways that the authors deal with their problems, but no one’s going to stick around to read James Lileks or Steven Den Beste when they’re listing all the pretty flowers currently blooming in their gardens.
So anyway, if I’m going to write a weblog that’s only going to be interesting when I talk about my troubles, why not say so in the domain name? But to be original and coin a term, why not include my name in it as well?
I learned the word schadenfreude from an English teacher in high school. It turns out that she pronounced the word wrong. She said SCHAY-den-froy-duh with a long ‘a’ sound instead of the more German and therefor more correct SCHAH-den-froy-duh with a European ‘a’: soft and short.
So I thought: JAY-sen, SCHAY-den; those are pretty similar sounding words. Why not use jasonfreude as the domain name for my weblog? So I did. And then I learned that I had been pronouncing schadenfreude wrong and that JAH-sen-froy-duh sounds nothing like my name.