Weltanschauung, Weltschmerz, Zeitgeist, Part 1

       Mentioning "yahrzeit" in yesterday's post reminded me of the essay I wrote on three German words:


       When I was doing a lot of heavy graduate school reading, I used regularly to run into certain italicized words that fascinated me.  I really didn't know what they meant (except from context, by which we can always tell exact meaning, right?), such words as weltanschauung, weltschmerz, and zeitgeist.

       I knew vaguely that they had to do with an aura, an outlook, a whole cast of feeling.  Maybe (now that I've looked them up) I'm even exaggerating the degree of comprehension I had.  What I did know was that there was something that could only be expressed by these foreign words, that nothing in English would quite suffice.