What do you call this time of year?
Words of the week: spukhaft & gruselig
“Spooky season” is a phrase that fills me with angst.
Not German Angst, but English “ayngst,” which is a degenerate form of angst in the Kierkegaardian sense: “a sympathetic antipathy and an antipathetic sympathy.” “Spooky season” is loathsome, and it tempts. It confronts me nauseously with my own freedom. All the basic Betties in the world…
…with all their combined might, cannot make me say it. But all that means is, if I do say it, it is mine.
Do I want it? Of course I want it. Who doesn’t want sp—
No. I will not.
But perhaps, with the protective insulation of another language, I can permit myself to handle it for a bit.
So how does a German say “spooky season”?
To begin with, he doesn’t say “spooky.”
There is a German cognate to spooky: spukhaft. This derives from Spuk, which is (like English spook) a relatively uncommon term for “ghost.” But spukhaft is not really equivalent to spooky, in part because spukhaft is more register-neutral.
See, spook came into English via Dutch, and Dutch is just funny to Anglophone ears. So it’s little surprise that the OED describes spook in the “ghost” sense as “[o]ften somewhat jocular or colloquial” and gives its first citation from an 1801 comic poem in Dutchglish.1 Spook-the-noun has since been soured by the accretion of other senses. But spooky still has (especially compared to its nearest synonyms, creepy and scary) a light, playful tone.2
To drive the words further apart, Spuk and spukhaft retain a closer connection to the idea of literal haunting. Twentieth-century clinical psychological literature refers to reported ghostly encounters as Spukerscheinungen. A house believed to be haunted is called, in all seriousness, a Spukhaus, and ghost hunters3 speak earnestly of spukhafte Ereignisse.4
So spooky, compared to spukhaft, is both broader in meaning and narrower in tone. How, then, can you say spooky season auf Deutsch?
There are, in fact, two ways: die gruselige Jahreszeit, or die Gruselsaison.5 Neither is all that popular, because both the term and the concept are mostly an American thing. But both are in actual use.
To Anglophones, these expressions may still seem a little off-base. Spooky connotes pleasing uncanniness, not deep horror. Grusel, meanwhile, sounds quite a bit like gruesome, and gruesome suggests, well, grue.6
Grue, however, simply means “shiver” or “shudder.” The gorier connotations of gruesome may come from its resemblance to other related words in… well, we’ll get to that in a moment.
Grusel also means “shiver” or “shudder.” At least, it originally did: it’s on its way to becoming as rare in that sense as English grue. Now it’s seen mostly in compounds7 and derivatives: the verb gruseln (“to horrify” or “to be horrified”) and the adjective gruselig.
Gruselig is softer, on average, than the rest of the Grusel clan. It’s translated as “spooky,” “scary,” or occasionally “creepy”—rather than words like “frightening” or “horrific.”
Putting this all together, gruselige Jahreszeit is a pretty obvious calque of spooky season, and Gruselsaison is more or less “horror season.”
But let’s get back to English gruesome. I won’t try to trace this to proto-anything, because these roots seem particularly tangled. But it is fairly well agreed that grue is related to German Grauen and Grausen, both of which mean “terror” or “dread.” Gruesome can be translated as grausig, grauenhaft, or grauenvoll.
But gruesome even more closely resembles yet another German adjective, grausam.
Grausam can mean something like “gruesome” in the English sense. But its primary meaning is “cruel.” It has cognates in Dutch, Danish, and Norwegian8 with similar double meanings, and influence from one or more of these may explain why, although cruelty is not part of its dictionary definition, gruesome so often carries a connotation of violence and moral dismay.
I guess I prefer to get away from that. Horror is the spice of art, but in a complicated way. It is capsaicin and sugar. Too much ooky-spookiness is cloying, but too much blood appalls.
I once spoke with a lady who averred she had never watched a horror movie. “You’ve never seen Bride of Frankenstein?” I asked.
She had.
Postscript: A Carol for the Season
Schmuck die Wand mit Spinnenweben (Fa la la, &c.) Zeit, den Grusel-Weg zu leben Spiel ein’ Symphonie des Grauens Und des gruseligen Schauerns
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Here’s the whole icky poem, as reprinted in a humor magazine in 1834.
Spaceports & Spidersilk is a kidlit magazine that publishes, among other things, horror stories that are “spooky, not terrifying.” Many years ago, back when it was called KidVisions, the guidelines included an additional explanation: “campfire stories that will allow you to sleep in the tent afterwards.”
Geisterjäger, which rhymes with “Coney-Bomb”
Einstein’s “spukhafte Fernwirkung” is usually translated as spooky action at a distance. Perhaps the slangier English word is considered appropriate because he was making fun of the idea.
I note the Jahreszeit–Saison doublet, but—beyond pointing out that German loves French like an eagle loves a lamb—I have nothing to say about it.
H. P. Lovecraft’s “Herbert West—Reanimator” was originally serialized under the title “Grewsome Tales.”
This spelling is not (as I assumed when I first saw it) facetious: it’s an accepted alternative that peaked in popularity around the turn of the twentieth century. By 1922, when Lovecraft’s story was published, it was on its way out.
One of these (per Kluge) is Grusical, patterned after the English noun musical and meaning “horror story.” Another is the wonderful Gruselclown.
English horror underwent the same meaning shift as Grusel, but earlier. In fact, horror’s transition began while it was still a Latin word.
Though not, it seems, Swedish