By RegoPark
Contributing Writer

I recently spent another fortnight across the pond in Europe. Back on a steamer cruise down the Danube when I was thinking about Drudge…

Oh, really. Come on, people! You really think I was giving a rat’s ass about Matt Drudge as I sailed past the cute little fairy tale villages along the Danube River Valley, wind blowing in my hair, the smell of pretzels wafting across the observation deck?

No, truth be told, I was “evacuating” myself from all that Hurricane Katrina coverage. I could run, but I couldn’t hide. The European media was all over the Gulf Coast. Even more unnerving was the fact that I have enough command of German vocabulary and grammar to get the gist of the headlines but not enough to capture its nuances. Thus, I was a more nervous wreck passing the newsstands in Vienna and Munich than if I’d spent all day glued to CNN at home.

German is a powerfully compact language with lots of creative possibilities for a news writer like Drudge. He’d really enjoy expressing himself in Deutsch (but as he remembers very little from several years in Hebrew school, perhaps he’s not a language person.) German makes me twice as anxious when reading bad news. Czech is very understated, French is drawn out…and I’m not even going there with Hungarian.

But there’s something satisfyingly astute about German that can capture the essence of a mood or feeling…or time, place or notion. If Grease is the word, there’s a German equivalent that says it just as well with a few extra syllables tacked on. Weltschmerz translates into contemporary English as “sorrow over the state of the world”, or, according to American Heritage Dictionary(the lexicon to the dirty American mind, boasting a comprehensive array of words banned by the FCC) defines weltschmerz as “Sadness over the evils of the world, esp. as an expression of romantic pessimism”. It translates between the two languages as “world weariness”, or more literally, “world-ache”, “world-pain”, or “world-hurt”.

Of course, there’s nothing romantic or excessive about the Drudge Report. But there was certainly a heapin’ helpin’ of weltschmerz in the German and Austrian media I monitored those two weeks– an achy-breaky vocabulary of pain that could reveal its essence without exclamation points, without flashing sirens, without extra words. But when I thought about it, even the sensational trappings of flash people know Drudge for have nothing to do with his real brand. When I think of the Drudge Report at its best, I think of something that is very simple, wittily sarcastic, and economical in language. I suppose it’s Matt Drudge’s own media speak that came to mind while I scanned those headlines, his own way of conveying weltschmerz in a language he understands.