Lingua

Words of the year

I know it’s February already and speaking of rankings that sum up the year 2009 is a bit outdated but I’m still quite amazed at the choice of words made by the German young people. German “youth” word of the previous year is ‘hartzen’ which means ‘to hang around doing nothing (usually due to being unemployed)’. The funny thing about it is that when I asked my German friends about it (they’re not teenagers any longer but you wouldn’t actually call them old yet) they didn’t really know what it meant. Most of them associated this word with ‘kiffen’ so ‘to smoke weed’. When I told what it’s supposed to mean, they accepted it, I mean it’s logical, the word comes from the unemployment benefit called ‘Hartz IV’ (after an adviser to former German chancellor). So the meaning is easy to guess if you have a few options or if you deduce logically, but is it really used?? That’s the thing with such contests – the language of the young people seems to be too regional, too quick-lived, and too ephemeral to  be subject of such rankings. Well, I just have to say that I find this particular word ‘hartzen’ especially funny because it reminds me of a somewhat entertaining Polish verb ‘harcować’ which means ‘to caper (about), to frolic (about)’.