Komasutra Didn’t Win but There’s Always Next Year
Germany holds an annual competition to crown the youth word of the year—Jugendwort des Jahres—and it is exactly as solemn as that sounds. A jury of linguists, academics, and some teenagers corralled from the nearest shopping center convenes, evaluates submissions, and emerges with a winner that manages to feel both two years late and faintly self-congratulatory. The whole operation has the energy of a school board trying very hard to seem like it understands memes.
Past champions include "Swag" (borrowed wholesale from English, which feels like giving up), "Niveaulimbo"—a limbo dance of cultural standards—"Gammelfleischparty," describing an event where women deemed too old share a dancefloor with men who are not, and "Hartzen," derived from Germany’s Hartz IV welfare program, meaning roughly to live on state support without any particular urgency to stop. The years get weirder.
This year’s winner was "Yolo." As in "you only live once." It entered German the way the best English loanwords do—slightly mangled, stripped of irony, enthusiastically deployed by people who use it without a trace of self-awareness right before making a catastrophically bad decision. The canonical image is a drunk fifteen-year-old screaming it into oncoming traffic while David Guetta plays somewhere in the background. The jury recognized greatness and awarded it accordingly.
The runners-up have their own poetry. "FU!"—not for anyone named Ute, regardless of what the press release claimed. "Yalla!," from Arabic, meaning hurry up, which has genuinely entered the daily vocabulary of every German city with enough of an immigrant population to have good falafel. "Wulffen," a gloriously overloaded verb covering: filling someone’s voicemail with rambling nothing, lying outright, and living comfortably at other people’s expense. And "Komasutra"—my personal favorite—describing sex between two people who are both completely obliterated. A real word. Submitted, considered, ranked.
The selection committee, I imagine, spent a cozy afternoon over sparkling water and crackers, pronouncing these terms aloud with the studied neutrality of academics who have committed to professionalism under very unusual circumstances. Next year I’m holding out for "Kottsen"—vomiting at Kottbusser Tor, the great Berlin equalizer—and "Fingerdisco," which describes being simultaneously fingered by three people, a term that has presumably never appeared at a Scrabble tournament but absolutely deserves a prize. The language grows. The jury deliberates. Yolo.