The Year of Bambus

There’s this German thing where every year older people sit down and vote for the youth word of the year. They’re trying to figure out how kids are actually talking when they’re not sending each other nudes on Snapchat or spamming shit-emojis on WhatsApp. It’s absurd and also kind of sincere—they genuinely want to understand.

2015 gave us some gems. Bambus for cool. Alpha Kevin for whoever’s the dumbest person in the room—pure cruelty, no irony. Gesichtspalmieren when something was so painfully bad you couldn’t help but face-palm yourself into oblivion.

The ones that actually described something real stuck around. Smombie for people zombied out on their phones walking through the street. Merkeln after Merkel, meaning to do absolutely nothing, make no decision. Skyler as a verb for annoying someone, borrowed from the Breaking Bad character everyone hated. Someone invented Maulpesto just to describe the specific horror of someone’s terrible breath.

But here’s the thing about documenting slang: the moment you write it down, the moment adults vote on it and assign it meaning, it’s already dead. You can’t pin down language like this. The kids aren’t using these terms because they came up with them organically anymore—they’re using them because they were officially selected as what we’re saying right now, which is the complete opposite of how actual language works. Real slang dies the second it gets named.

By the time the voting committee publishes their list with definitions, kids have already moved on to whatever comes next. The chase is eternal and pointless, and everyone involved knows it. But they keep doing it anyway. There’s something kind of sad about it.