Epicaricacy is a noun referring to the quiet, delicious, morally indefensible little orgasm you get when some smug motherfucker finally eats the exact shit sandwich he or she spent years force-feeding everyone else.
German has schadenfreude, sure, but that’s the tourist version, the Disneyland of malice.  Epicaricacy is the back-alley, no-safe-word edition.  Think of it as schadenfreude’s eccentric cousin who insists one wearing velvet pants to funerals and ordering wine in Latin while correcting your pronunciation of “bruschetta.”
It’s etymology is a straight up Latin/Greek smash-and-grab:
epi– (“upon”)
chara (“joy”)
Kakos (“evil” or “misfortune”)
So, literally: joy-upon-evil, with a hard middle-finger detour through the medieval habit of pretending you’re enjoying someone’s downfall for “pedagogical reasons.”  The word itself was basically invented in 1715 by some wigged Brit who wanted to sound smarter than the Germans while still getting his rocks off watching dukes slip on ice.  Respect.

The sign outside the cantina flickered like a dying insect: “Carnaval de Gasolina.”¹ Nobody cared. By midnight, the joint was a pharmacological zoo—cheap mezcal poured into motor oil cans, cocaine cut with talcum powder, and tabs of acid shaped like Biden’s neck waddles.²
I was three shots past coherence when Frankie “Dos Cuchillos” decided to rob the bar.³ He didn’t bother with a mask—just stormed in waving machetes like he was auditioning for a narco telenovela. The jukebox kept playing “Sweet Caroline,” which made the whole thing feel like a parody of violence.
Somebody threw a chair. Somebody else threw up. Frankie screamed about “redistributing wealth” while pocketing pesos and half a bag of Doritos. Then the federales showed up, already drunk from the bowling alley across the street. One officer tried to tase Frankie, missed, and electrocuted the jukebox instead. Neil Diamond died mid-chorus.
As Frankie got tackled into a puddle of spilled mezcal, the entire bar erupted in laughter. Not nervous laughter, not relief—just pure, uncut joy at watching chaos eat itself alive. That’s when I realized the word for this exact moment existed: epicaricacy.⁴ The pleasure of watching someone else’s disaster, the giddy schadenfreude of seeing a man with two knives get flattened by his own stupidity.
I lit a cigarette off the sparking jukebox, raised my glass to the carnage, and thought: Mexico, you beautiful bastard, never change.

Footnotes & Citations

1. See “Semiotics of Neon Failure in Border Economies,” Journal of Applied Cantina Studies, Vol. 12, No. 3 (1998), pp. 45–67.
2. For a comparative analysis of Biden iconography in psychedelic paraphernalia, consult “Sleepy Joe and the Acid Tab: A Psychoactive Presidency,” Annals of Illicit Semiotics, Vol. 7 (2024).
3. Nicknames in Tijuana function as both biography and prophecy. Cf. “The Ontology of Narco Sobriquets,” Revista de Crimen y Cultura, Vol. 2, No. 1 (2011).
4. Epicaricacy: see “Obscure Lexicons of Schadenfreude,” Proceedings of the International Symposium on Pretentious Vocabulary, Vol. 1 (2009).

N.P.: “Sad But True” – Mexican Institute of Sound