The “Youth Word of the Year” has been chosen in Germany since 2008, and it’s that time again on Tuesday. This year, “smash”, a kind of modern “Geil”, is considered to be one of the more promising candidates. But nothing is more fleeting than youth and its expressions. Only one thing remains constant: young people define themselves by what is hip, what they find good or just “smash”. So let’s take a look back at words that once stood for the lifestyle of one or more generations. Expressions that would have deserved the title “Youth Word of the Year” if it had existed back then.
cool
No other youth word that is still in use is likely to have an older history than “geil”. Its roots are probably Indo-European, since the 15th century it has been used to allude to sexual desire – a major reason why the expression is still very popular in German-speaking countries today. Its traditional use in botany (for shoots of a tree that stand vertically upwards) also gives the word a smugness, to which the onomatopoeic expression “smash” (literally: to smash, slang meaning: to tow someone) which is currently popular among young people does not match its complexity. And so “geil” is likely to continue to rise steeply in the coming years, because regardless of whether you want to express excitement, attractiveness or obsession with it (career, money and power greed) – sexually connoted puns always work.
Cool
If things are getting hot somewhere, the one who keeps a cool head, i.e. stays “cool”, is to be envied. Coolness, one tends to forget that in the days of the gas price cap, does not necessarily have to be a bad thing. And so the music world praises the album “Birth of the cool” by jazz trumpeter Miles Davis (1926-1991) to this day. Because “Cool Jazz” was less extroverted than bebop, from which it emerged, and that’s why it was special. As a common metaphor for an emotional state, “cool” has been used in England since the 18th century, and in Germany in the 1990s it is said to have been the most frequently used adjective of the decade. A success that has remained “cool” denied to this day.
Hip
Hip has nothing to do with the English hip (and therefore nothing to do with hip-hop), nor with baby food, the only thing that is still really hip(p) with new parents, like them Wise Guys sang. Rather, it comes from “hep” and as such described everything that was hot in the African-American jazz scene of the 1920s. As “hip” the word also crept into the youthful language of white people in the following decades and finally out of the USA. The word “hip” is a wonderful way to study how youthful language works through demarcation and appropriation: in America in the 1950s, anyone who considered themselves modern and hip called themselves hipsters and were ridiculed by conservatives as hippies. The hipsters, in turn, called wannabe hipsters hippies as well. The peace-loving youth of the 1960s, who had grown out of the hipster movement, adopted the term without further ado and called themselves hippies. The hipster, on the other hand, was initially forgotten before suddenly reappearing at the beginning of the 21st century with a full beard, undercut and jute bag and asking for Club Mate.
Great
In no children’s book does the word “prima” (French: chouette) appear more frequently than in the German translation of “Der kleine Nick”, where in the early 1970s it basically stands for everything that makes for a happy childhood: glass marbles, football, bicycle, astronaut costumes or tube televisions. At that time, older high school students first attended the “Unterprima” and then the “Oberprima”. The shouts of joy “Great!” and “Great!” come from school, so to speak. Apparently people used to much rather go there than in today’s times of the STEM curriculum prescribed by the Bavarian Ministry of Education.
bearded
Finding someone bearish doesn’t have to mean they’re strong and hairy. The described can also be just great. The word is still widespread, especially in the south of the German-speaking area. A famous user is Hansi Hinterseer – for the 68-year-old Tyrolean, the term is exactly right, both geographically and generationally. What few people know: Originally, “bärig” did not come from the teddy bear, brown bear or black bear, but from the medieval term for breeding boar. Even today, the male pig is called Bär or Saubär by many Bavarians, Swabians or Austrians. Bearig used to mean that a pig is ready to mate. Isn’t that strong, if not to say: awesome?
scents
Fragrances would probably have died out long ago if it weren’t for the pun-loving journalists who put it in the title of almost every text about flowers or perfumes. However, no woman today wants to be described as a “fragrant girl”, as the dictionary suggests as an example sentence, just as few would like to be sung about by Götz Alsmann with: “You are fragrant / mistress of all coffee shops / you can also look at yourself from behind let see.” The youth word of the 1960s comes from the Yiddish “toff”, which also became a fashionable word around the same time and means something like “good”. But “fragrance” remained in the air: In 1991, Nina Hagen thought “Berlin is fragrant”, so much so that it apparently needed a song. And Götz Alsmann only sang about “the queen in our office” in his song “Dufte” in 1999.
Knorke
You would probably still agree that Claire Waldoff was cool today, even if she would have said “knork” herself. The cabaret artist and chanson singer wore a tie, her hair short, smoked and cursed on stage and shaped the lesbian scene in Berlin in the 1920s. And she liked to say and sing the little word “knork”, which first appeared in the 1910s. “The Knorkitis was raging,” Kurt Tucholsky wrote in 1924, and at that time already declared the word dead again. Helmut Schmidt probably missed that because he was only five at the time, and knorke nevertheless remained a formative expression of his childhood, just like he did in another Thousands of times told in an interview.
famous
Famos is originally spelled “Fameux” and has the French meaning “famous”, which in this country was already equated with “great” by influencers of the 19th century. Today “famos” is used exclusively by FAZ columnists, visitors to the Bayreuth Wagner Festival, collectors of militaria and (albeit ironically) by the singer Max Raabe. The roughly equally old “Grandioso” is probably more common at the moment, which is derived from the Italian “Grandioso” and is therefore not quite as Wilhelmine as an interjection as its famous brother.