October 15, 2003
Lipoprotein envy. A couple of weeks or so ago, I came across a blog entry wherein the author introduced and defined a German word that meant "sorrow felt at another's good fortune"; in other words, the lexical mirror-image of schadenfreude. To my discredit, I cannot remember the blog or even the word. A shame, because the opportunity to use it arose today. From an article describing research on the relation between longevity and the possession of the mongo version of a certain cholesterol-carrying molecule:

The gene may be one reason why some centenarians in Dr. Barzilai's study have lived to 100, even though they were overweight or ate badly.

"I hate to say it," he said. "but I think it's true. If you have this gene, you can smoke and you can be fat and you can not exercise. This sounds to me terrible."


Posted by Moira Breen at October 15, 2003 01:37 PM
Comments

"This sounds to me terrible."?? Yes, yes it does.

Posted by: J. on October 16, 2003

"why some centenarians in Dr. Barzilai's study have lived to 100"

um. . . isn't that a rather stupid thing to say? How many centenarians - people who have lived for a hundred years - don't live to be 100?

Besides, being fat or being a smoker won't always kill you - although it usually does.

Posted by: DavidD on October 19, 2003

There's a perfectly good English word for that emotion.
Envy. :)

Posted by: Kathy on October 20, 2003

If that's not fancy enough, why not ``freudenschade''?

Posted by: Anton Sherwood on November 27, 2003

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