German word for “inappropriate joy”

[stevesr0Member]

I remembered witzelsucht from decades ago in medical school or college but today when I searched online that comes up as a rare neurological condition characterized by a tendency to make inappropriate jokes.

Google says scheudenfruede is the word for inappropriate joy.

Wondering if there is a third German word (or the meanings changed in the last 49 years?

[RobinMember]

Hi @Stevesr0, your college is right, this word exists in German actually. It describes the medical terminus “Moria”, classified as a disease under ICD-10: F07.0 Organische Persönlichkeitsstörung. See Wikipedia for details.
I’m not sure whether this matches in English language your term inappropriate joy.
While I’m pretty sure that Schadenfreude translates to malicious joy. Never heard inappropriate joy, nor does it exist in my dictionary. But I’m not a native English speaker, so somebody who is might explain the differences between these two. Once I know what precisely means inappropriate joy, I can translate it for you properly to German.

Windows is like a submarine. Open a window and serious problems will start.

[K123Member]

… unpassende Freude …

Die germanischen Sprachen haben einen extrem großen Wortschatz. Das Englische aber einen noch größeren, als das Deutsche. So kann passieren, im Deutschen gibt es für einen englischen Begriff doch nichts, was diesem exakt entspricht.

Greetings (und Danke, daß du so feinfühlig bist)

[RobinMember]

K123 wrote:

unpassende Freude

If this is a close match, I’d propose unangemessene Heiterkeit or unangebrachte Witzelei or deplaciertes Possenreißen as some more options. I’m just not sure whether this expression inappropriate joy isn’t actually established medical terminology in English language, like Steve’s proposal Witzelsucht implies.

Windows is like a submarine. Open a window and serious problems will start.

[stevesr0Member]

In response, all I can offer is a vague recollection of someone mentioning witzelsucht as translating to inappropriate joy. I THINK it was in psychiatry and considered an abnormal mode of behavior, BUT today when I looked it up, I saw that it was correlated with a pathological change in part of the brain.

So, I wasn’t sure if the usage had changed from a behavioral “peculiarity” of an annoying sort to a marker of disease in the past 50 years or so.

I posted here figuring that the German speaking might know if a similar term to witzelsucht that really was the one I was recalling.

Apparently, it is more of a medically related term than a common German term for an annoying but normal behavior trait.

So much for the fun of aging <g>, say I in a witzelsuchty way.

• This reply was modified 3 days, 5 hours ago by stevesr0.
• This reply was modified 3 days, 5 hours ago by stevesr0.

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