Foot Beer, Sidewalk Decoration, and the Annual Youth Slang Democracy
Every year in Germany, a panel of credentialed adults convenes to select the Jugendwort des Jahres—the official youth word of the year. The youth themselves are largely unaware this is happening. A word gets nominated, a winner gets announced, a press release goes out. The 2014 longlist is worth examining anyway, because it contains some genuine finds.
Some nominations arrive fully formed from elsewhere. Hayvan—Turkish for "animal"—appears in the speech of German teenagers with Turkish roots as a flexible intensifier, positive or negative depending on delivery, roughly equivalent to "beast" in English slang. Twerking is twerking. FOMO is FOMO. Selfie is on the list, somehow still requiring official recognition in 2014. These borrow from wider currents and need no further explanation.
The homegrown German coinages are more interesting. Fußpils—literally "foot beer"—means beer you carry with you into the street. This is a perfect word and I want it adopted everywhere immediately. Bürgersteigdeko, "sidewalk decoration," means dog shit. Also perfect. Immatrikulationshintergrund—"matriculation background"—describes a person so unhandy at practical tasks they must have gone to university instead: a single compound noun carrying an entire class prejudice. Obamern means to spy or eavesdrop, coined in the immediate wake of the NSA revelations with Snowden still fresh in everyone’s memory. Its companion entsnowden means to decrypt or expose. Both will age badly. In September 2014 they feel exactly right.
The rest range from useful to opaque. Likegeilheit—the pathological hunger for social media validation, the specific itch of wanting your posts liked by as many people as possible—is a concept English has no equally compact word for. Emoxif, apparently meaning dismissive and bitchy and self-absorbed, has unclear etymology and a sound that makes me vaguely uneasy. Fappieren means what you’d guess from the first four letters and requires no further commentary. Assistempel is a tattoo, which makes sense when you consider what the first part of that compound could plausibly mean.
My vote would have gone to Fußpils. Obviously. Nobody asked me, which carries its own Immatrikulationshintergrund energy if I’m being honest. Lass mal auf die Bürgersteigdeko fappieren, du Propa mit Immatrikulationshintergrund.