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Breakwater off the British coast
Photo: Owen Humphreys / A Wire / picture alliance / dpa
For a linguistic community, proclaiming the "word of the year" is a bit like tattooing a funny caricature or an oath of love for the individual: It hardly hurts, is happy for the moment and has a high potential for embarrassment in the long run.
In this respect, the Germans can be relieved that the Society for the German Language has today declared "Wellenbrecher" as the word of the year and unthinkable competitive words such as "infection driver", "vaccinee" or "virus thrower".
The breakwater, as the Wiesbaden-based language partners explained, was "a term known from coastal protection and shipbuilding" and "is used for measures that are used to protect the population in the corona pandemic."
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German language: »Wellenbrecher« is the word of the year 2021
For the choice of a not too flat, symbolic, almost poetic term this year, the Wiesbadeners deserve praise.
It is easy to see why in retrospect.
As the word of the year, “breakwater” is by no means as obvious and banal as the annual words “fan mile” (2006) or “financial crisis” (2008), “refugees” (2015) or “corona pandemic” (2020).
And it is not as vague and informative as "Rescue Routine" (2012) or "Respendet" (2019).
To protect against the forces of nature
In the context of a pandemic, a look at the editorial archive reveals that the “breakwater” was already included in the public discourse in March 2020 by a Hamburg Senator for Health to justify the closure of bars and clubs. At the latest with Karl Lauterbach's call for a »breakwater shutdown« in October 2020, the term spilled into the mainstream. At around the same time, the state government of Baden-Württemberg started a corona information campaign with the hashtag #wellenbrecher. In terms of history, the award for the breakwater comes a year too late.
In terms of technology history, the breakwater found its way from the often lonely sea beach and the highly complex art of shipbuilding to the football stadium, which is always crowded outside of corona times, long before today. At the sea, piers in harbors and groynes on the beach are called breakwaters. In the sports arena, the metal barriers on the steps of standing room grandstands are called this: The steel barriers are intended to prevent visitors from being pushed and crushed by large and often uncontrollable crowds.
That is pretty close to the definition of the breakwater of infection, as it has been heard from German politicians in recent months, for example like this: The umpteenth wave should be contained with »measures that buy us time and the course of the epidemic slow down overall so that our health system is not overwhelmed «.
The breakwater protects people from the forces of nature - and from those of their own kind.
A drosten who has become a word
So for society as a whole, the word of the year 2021 stands for the promise of containment, the promise of calm, better times. It is, if you will, a word of welfare and precaution, an incarnation of Christian Drosten that has become a word. Will future people still shake their heads and cause incomprehension like the “light limit” from 2014, which almost all of us would have to googling today in order to understand what was meant by it? Will the word be a reason to be ashamed of others like the annual word “multimedia” from 1995, which today can only be perceived as naive and gaga? The breakwater in the coastal protection sense has the fact that it waits relatively unimpressed and statically for the things and water masses that come ashore,whether the concrete wave deflection instrument is a concrete tetrapod or a prickly artificial coral reef.
Anyone who is enthusiastic about the cinema should think of the film title "Breaking the Waves" pretty quickly when they hear this year's word of the year.
This is a masterpiece by the director Lars von Trier from the mid-nineties, one of the greatest love films of all and so emotionally a real icebreaker.
The heroine, played by Emily Watson, committed to her lover and committed to Christianity, speaks the confident sentence: "God gives everyone a talent." That is what we should also do in 2021 for the women and men of the Wiesbaden Society for the German Language and their current decision accept the "word of the year".
You have made a top choice.
If I were a surfer, I would even have the word tattooed on my ankle.
