Vicarious - Title explanation

[mosquitokillah]

Is there anyone out there who knows to explain the word 'Vicarious' to me?
Sorry, I'm from Austria, I'm not that good in English and the dictionaries describe that word in a way, that makes me much more confused.
Please help me, thanx!

(By the way: The Mars Volta got also a track called 'Vicarious' on their next album - oh my goodness, I never heard that word before! Shame on me :-( )

[spacemonkeyadb]

Is there anyone out there who knows to explain the word 'Vicarious' to me?
Sorry, I'm from Austria, I'm not that good in English and the dictionaries describe that word in a way, that makes me much more confused.
Please help me, thanx!

Sure. "Vicarious" is usually used as an adverb to describe how one lives their life. A person is living vicariously if the most important events in his or her life are events that happened to other people. Hence, parents are often spoken of as living vicariously through the successes & failures of their children. We are living vicariously when we ignore our own lives in order to feed upon the misfortunes of others shown to us on the TV or in other media.

Does this help?

[UFOtofu]

Most simply - to experience secondhand. "When I watched 'Saving Private Ryan' I felt vicarious fear."

But spacemonkey's explanation and examples are more useful being the most common applications.

[Old formula]

to sum it up, vicariously = indirectly

[mosquitokillah]

Wow, thanxalot. This is definitely an explanation I understand. The dictionaries describe in a way that I understood something like 'substitute' or 'surrogate.
Well, now I got it!
Thanx to all!

[wearethestories]

to sum it up, vicariously = indirectly
AHHHHHH....

no!!!!!!!!

RORSHACH!!!