The Word of the Year says quite a bit about public debates. In the last two years, the Society for the German language has chosen the words “Fanmeile” (“fan mile,” referring to the public viewing and celebrating spaces during the Soccer World Cup in Germany in 2006) and “Bundeskanzlerin” (the female version of the word “chancellor”) as word of the year.
And now “Klimakatastrophe” (climate catastrophe) was selected as the Word of the Year 2007. I believe it is true that Germans have talked more about climate change this year than ever before. The biggest change, however, took place in the United States. Awareness for climate change as well as political activism and environmentally friendly behavior increased so much within the last 12 months. It’s amazing. Is it really mainly Al Gore’s movie that made the difference?
Anyway, I can’t remember who said it first about some international security related matter, but I think it is true regarding environmental policies as well: Americans and their elected representatives might not be fast in making a decision, but once they have made up their minds, they implement their decisions quickly and with full force, while Europe is much slower in the implementation. So perhaps US environmental practices will soon be much more progressive in all areas than those in Europe; in some they are already.
Endnote: No words related to climate change are competing in the Merriam-Webster’s Word of the Year contest. Voting ended yesterday. The results are not in yet. I have no clue what seven of the candidates mean:
Apathetic, babymoon, blamestorm, charlatan, conundrum, cruft, eleemosynary, facebook, hyprocrite, linkability, melancholy, Pecksniffian, pretentious, pugnacious, quixotic, sardoodledom, sputum, subpoena, vanity_sizing, and wOOt.
I love the 2006 winner of the American Dialect Society contest: “Plutoed.” As a non-native speaker it is great fun to learn new words.
Joerg Wolf is founder and editor-in-chief of the Atlantic Review (http://atlanticreview.org), a blog on transatlantic relations sponsored by the German Fulbright Alumni Association.
He currently works as editor-in-chief of the Open Think Tank atlantic-community.org in Berlin.
Joerg studied political science at the Free University of Berlin and worked as a research associate for the International Risk Policy project at the Free University’s Center for Transatlantic Foreign and Security Policy. He has been a Fulbright scholar at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore and Washington DC and has worked for the Friedrich Ebert Foundation in Cairo and in Berlin.