Glucose-Haltig as Fuck
Every year, the German dictionary publisher Langenscheidt runs a competition to crown the official "Youth Word of the Year"—a process that involves surveying actual teenagers about the slang they use, passing the results through some kind of editorial committee, and presenting the winner to the adult population as proof that someone has their finger on the cultural pulse. The results are reliably mortifying for everyone, including, presumably, the teenagers.
The 2018 shortlist was a masterpiece of the form. In consideration: "verbuggt" (broken, full of errors—as in: you’re so verbuggt, you’re annoying), "glucose-haltig" (sweet, meaning a person), "Ehrenmann/Ehrenfrau" (a man or woman of honor—someone who does something genuinely decent for you), "Lauch" (literally: leek; figuratively: idiot), "Auf dein Nacken!" (you’re paying!), the imported "AF / as fuck" for general emphasis, "Sheeeesh" in its global iteration, "Ich küss dein Auge" (I’m fond of you, or an extremely emphatic thank you), "Snackosaurus" (someone constitutionally incapable of stopping eating), and "Lindnern"—officially defined as preferring to do nothing rather than do something badly.
I will stake everything I own on the fact that no person under forty has ever said "Lindnern" out loud in a genuine sentence. The word was minted after Christian Lindner, the German liberal politician who walked out of coalition talks in 2017 with the line "it is better not to govern than to govern badly"—a clean political exit line that someone at Langenscheidt apparently decided would translate into living street slang. It did not. There is no version of events in which a teenager generated this word organically. Someone got too excited about a news story and it ended up on the shortlist.
The winner was "Ehrenmann/Ehrenfrau." A man or woman of honor. Someone who does something genuinely good for you. Which is, on the merits, a real piece of language that real young people actually use—I’ve heard it, it exists, it has a warmth to it that most slang doesn’t. It also now carries the faint institutional stench of having won a dictionary award, which I suspect will accelerate its retirement from actual usage by about eighteen months.
Ich küss dein verbuggtes Auge, du Lauch.