Enlarge image
Youth word »Cringe« on mobile phone display (symbol picture)
Photo: Marijan Murat / picture alliance / dpa
I am a little ashamed to write this text.
Because I have to write about a word that I promised not to use.
Some time ago, a young person asked me to do this on the grounds that anything else would be super embarrassing, especially in front of friends.
Unfortunately, it has to be once, then never again.
I'm saying goodbye to
cringe
, a word that I liked very much, even if I wasn't allowed to pronounce it.
For a few years now it has filled a gap in my German vocabulary.
But now it becomes unusable.
The Langenscheidt publishing house killed it for its PR.
Briefly to the facts: since 2008 the Langenscheidt publishing house has chosen a »youth word of the year«.
This year
cringe was lifted
onto the vocabulary
throne
.
The adjective describes something embarrassing for which one is so embarrassed that it becomes almost physically uncomfortable.
One winces.
You probably know that.
There are whole series that build on this feeling, "Jerks" for example.
Adolescents find their parents
cringe
when they
ingratiate
themselves.
It's a wonderful, almost onomatopoeic word, and I'm always happy to hear it.
Now it's getting embarrassing because
cringe is
all over the news.
The annual vocabulary and the attention that is paid to it is of course completely
cringe itself
.
Adults and their media makers only rush to it because they want to stick with the consumers, readers and voters of tomorrow.
Young people always ignore the youth word of the year assigned to them from above anyway.
Did Langenscheidt invent these words himself?
A word that makes it to Langenscheidt's linguists usually lags a few years behind, so it's not
fly
at all
. And it serves a commercial purpose: With the election, Langenscheidt is promoting his would-be academic lexicon "100 percent youth language". In the past few years, it always read as if professional PR people had been researching the worst style
blooms
on Twitter over a few bottles of red wine:
guttenbergen
,
underage
,
containing glucose
,
bugged
- sorry, never heard of it, never heard from a
youngster
. And I have many around me. After a few years the rumor arose that Langenscheidt was simply inventing the words himself.
It wasn't until 2020 that Langenscheidt came up with the idea of asking young people what their favorite words would be (previously curated by a jury).
And received even more headwind: someone programmed a bot that voted for "son of a bitch" at regular intervals.
One wanted to protest against the youth word in general and show how irrelevant it is, explained a Reddit user.
And that's true.
Couldn't Langenscheidt have noticed how
cringe
everything is?
Now
cringe is
on the death list because it is being instrumentalized by the adult world.
Young people are quite peculiar there.
Those words that are voted the coolest »word of the year« by an uncool dictionary publisher should immediately become a no-go for the really cool.
The fact that adults strive to grasp, catalog and define the language of adolescents is an already pathetic attempt to understand what cannot be understood.
The elderly want to capture the attitude towards life of adolescence, which mainly consists of the fact that everything is constantly changing.
It's like trying to put butterflies in a terrarium.
You should just leave it.
