The Year Germany Invented a Verb for Angela Merkel
To merkeln is to do nothing, decide nothing, say nothing—a verb that German teenagers apparently derived directly from Chancellor Angela Merkel’s governing philosophy. It landed on the 2015 shortlist for Germany’s Youth Word of the Year, an annual competition in which graying academics and media professionals attempt to document how the country’s under-20s communicate with each other. The previous winners include "Babo" (boss), "YOLO," "Swag," and the magnificent Gammelfleischparty—literally "rotten meat party," a term for nights out attended by people over thirty.
The shortlist this year has some genuinely inspired entries. Skylern means to annoy someone, built from Skyler White of Breaking Bad—a character so comprehensively despised by a certain slice of the show’s audience that her name became a common synonym for irritation. Smombie fuses "smartphone" and "zombie" to describe anyone drifting through public space with eyes fixed on a screen; the word predates the wave of think-pieces about phone addiction by several years and says everything those pieces say in seven letters. Swaggetarier is someone who is vegetarian purely for image reasons, which is such a specific and accurate category of person that the word practically writes itself.
Then there’s Alpha Kevin—simply defined as the dumbest person in any given group. Kevin has become, in Germany’s recent cultural imagination, a name associated with a particular flavor of spectacular failure, the way certain names accrue meanings in any language. Gesichtspalmieren is a Germanification of facepalming: verbing it is the move, letting you conjugate your embarrassment. Augentinitus describes the discomfort of being surrounded by stupid people, riffing on tinnitus but triggered by sight rather than sound—presumably coined during school.
Some of these will dissolve by December, archaeological evidence of a very specific moment. Bambus (cool, intense) and lockerlich (easy, natural—a compound of locker and sicherlich) probably won’t survive the year. But merkeln will stick. Some words find their subject too precisely to disappear.