Posts Tagged: emotion

Ode to Joy has its 200th birthday

This week (on Tuesday 7 May 2024) was the 200th anniversary of the first performance of Ludwig van Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9 in D minor, Opus 125. It was first performed on 7 May 1824 in Vienna. The Ninth Symphony is a masterpiece of Western classical music and one of the supreme achievements in the […]
Understanding schadenfreude

When you respond to other people’s emotions there are four very distinct ways of doing so:

Sympathy is when you are unhappy at the unhappiness of others;

Joy is when you are happy at the happiness of others;

Envy is when you are unhappy at the happiness of others;

And schadenfreude is when you are happy at the unhappiness of others.
A few words for a thousand kisses

On Valentines Day we explore if English provides an adequate vocabulary to describe a thousand different kisses. Robert Herrick (1591-1674) wrote much verse about love and the appreciation of life. He was a poet of simple but eloquent language and, therefore, his work is most valuable in understanding the language of love: Give me a kiss, […]
Bliss

Bliss means extreme happiness or ecstasy. In a Christian, religious context it is the ecstasy of salvation or the joy that comes from spiritual connection with the divine.

Psychobabble—mental health jargon10/09/2026
Psychobabble is psychological jargon used inaccurately and pretentiously that sometimes normalises unacceptable behaviour or criticises normal behaviour. It is also known as therapy-speak or pop psychology. A more specialised branch of psychobabble is neurobabble. It is the vocabulary of the consulting room that has escaped into everyday conversation—trauma, triggered, boundaries, validation, gaslighting. It turns the… Read more: Psychobabble—mental health jargon
Meeting behaviours04/09/2026
Australian professionals are experienced and well-educated yet put them in meetings with clear objectives, agendas to address, or problems to solve and peculiar behaviours start to manifest. The Ringelmann effect suggests that the more people in a meeting the less value they contribute. Max Ringelmann discovered in the 1880s that as more people pulled on… Read more: Meeting behaviours
Danish and “Viking marketing”24/08/2026
In AD 793 the Viking Age was kicked off when Viking raiders attacked Lindisfarne, an island off the northeast coast of England, plundered its Christian monastery, killed or enslaved the monks and appropriated its religious treasures. The Vikings were undoubtedly accomplished shipbuilders, sailors and traders, but their economic model was simpler—to leverage the quality of… Read more: Danish and “Viking marketing”

Ode to Joy has its 200th birthday