words English is missing:

[ratcreature]

Verschlimmbesserung, i.e. a portmanteau of Verbesserung (improvement) and Verschlimmerung (deterioration/worsening), to describe intended improvements or upgrades that end up making everything worse. Also used as a verb ("verschlimmbessern"), cousin to the equally useful "kaputtreparieren" (repair/tinker with a thing to the point that it becomes broken). Not entirely unrelated to this language observation, I'm still trying to decide whether I should opt to display everything on LJ in my style (which I find confusing, because I'm used to comms and journals all having their layout), or deal with the new comment pages on comms that have not disabled them, which unfortunately includes a number of fest comms I'd been browsing.

Comments

[rosaw]

Yes, I agree wholeheartedly. German has many words we could really use in English. Schadenfreude for example. ;-) I think kaputtreparieren is one of the greatest words in the universe.

Do you know an Italian word that means something like 'suffers pain when others are embarrassed'? -- I saw it once (I don't read or speak Italian) but can't find it again. I don't mean to assume that since you are literate in German that you know all European languages -- I don't know a Spanish equivalent (my somewhat underused secondlanguage) but I thought you might have an idea.

[ratcreature]

Yes, English should adopt these. Especially on the internet I miss them as description of changes quite often. Not just LJ, just a while ago it fit Delicious.

And I'm afraid I can't help with the Italian. I only had English, Latin and French in school and then took some Spanish courses later, and I'm not really fluent in any of these romance languages, so I can't even guess. Though I think that embarrassment is connected to pain in word roots is quite common, e.g. in German if something is embarrassing it's "peinlich" which derives from an older word for pain in German, especially if it is inflicted by others, which is "Pein" (you can see how that shares the root with the English, basically it's the same Germanic word, and it also has torture connotations, like "peinliche Befragung" doesn't mean embarrassing questions, but is an old term for questioning with torture).