BONUS. Word-of-the-year isn't just a U.S. phenomenon, other countries have their words too. John Kelly and I go through some of these other great words in this Grammarpalooza bonus episode.
BONUS. Word-of-the-year isn't just a U.S. phenomenon, other countries have their words too. John Kelly and I go through some of these other great words in this Grammarpalooza bonus episode.
John Kelly is the former vice president of editorial at Dictionary.com. You can find him at mashedradish.com.
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COMPUTER-GENERATED TRANSCRIPT
MIGNON: Yeah. Greetings, Grammarpaloozians! We're here for your bonus segment with John Kelly, formerly of Dictionary.com, and still a major word guy. In this segment, we're going to talk about words of the year from countries outside the U.S. because a lot of them are just fascinating. John, thanks for being here.
JOHN: Thank you. Let's talk about words abroad. The word of the year sometimes can be inward-looking—what's on the mind in my country—but it's always worthwhile to look up and look out and see what other countries pick, and it can provide a welcome window into very different concerns, as we'll see in some of the winners here.
Should we start with Japan?
MIGNON: Yeah, let's.
JOHN: Japan has a couple of words of the year. One that really caught my attention is the kanji of the year.
MIGNON: Ooh, nice.
JOHN: Kanji. First, what is kanji? K-A-N-J-I. Kanji is a Japanese writing system, and it has several writing systems, but this one is for characters that are adapted from Chinese.
So just as English has a ton of words from French and Latin, Japanese has a ton of words from Chinese as well, and it uses kanji to write them. And it's the formal way of writing from what I understand. Now, this year's kanji of the year, according to the Japan Kanji Aptitude Testing Foundation, is "kin."
And that means gold or money. Now, people chose keen for a few reasons. A big reason was Japanese athletes. So at the Olympics this year and the Paralympics this year, Japanese athletes apparently had a lot of success, and back here in the States, you might know a certain baseball player named Shohei Ohtani, who is a tremendous athlete and more than a superstar in Japan, and gold reflects that.
Japan also selected kanji for other reasons related to personal finances, for a number of specific scandals or financial crises in its country, but that wasn't the only Japanese word of the year.
MIGNON: What was it? Yeah, I really liked—there was one, I think it's K-A-I-W-A-I.
JOHN: K-A-I-W-A-I. "kay-weigh" is probably how I would say it. Japanese grammarians, please correct me.
MIGNON: Yes.
JOHN: But this means neighborhood?
MIGNON: Yeah, neighborhood or local area. And so it started out as a word describing a geography, but it sounds like people have started using it more to describe their friend group. Like you are my neighborhood.
JOHN: And a similar thing happened in slang and informal language here in the English-speaking world where "chat" became used in the same way. So you might say, maybe you're hanging out with a group of friends before class or something. You might say, "Hey, chat, what did you think of the game last night?" And this appears to draw from a chat group or, even more so, a text message chat.
 money word; it wasn't the first time that they had chosen that word. Yeah. Yeah.
JOHN: No, I was reading that this is the fifth time. King gold or money has been chosen as the "congee" of the year by voters in the Japan Congee Aptitude Testing Foundation. I love this. I love the idea that it's all right if a word of the year-picking body chooses a word multiple times. Five times in a few years, in the
U.S., in the English-speaking world, there's a tendency to not repeat words of the year because you want your dictionary and what it's doing to stand out. So it's a different way of thinking maybe.
MIGNON: Yeah, super interesting. And then looking at the, in the U.S., we have the kids driving language, but of course, that happens everywhere. So there's the German Youth Word of the Year.
JOHN: I believe it's a German dictionary, the Langenscheidt German Youth, the Langenscheidt dictionary, or the Langenscheidt publisher. They do a German Youth Word of the Year. And the word that won this was "Aura," A-U-R-A. This was also a big social media trend this year. In general, somebody's aura is their cool factor, and it's a little bit similar to vibe or energy.
So if somebody has big energy or main character energy, or somebody has good vibes, you might also say they have aura, or they give aura. It's very common to talk about athletes too as having aura, and the German word for aura also happens to be "Aura," A-U-R-A, and the trend that was happening on our cell phones here was also happening over there and the particular trend was this game of quantifying somebody's aura. So if you did something smoothly or coolly, you would have positive aura points.
But if you had toilet paper on your shoe, you might have negative aura points. And this was a social media trend of putting together funny videos about these things, and aura prevailed in Germany, or at least for this German vote.
MIGNON: Cool. Oh, so interesting. And then Switzerland, nearby to Germany—actually, I don't know if—God, is that even true? In my mind, it is.
JOHN: In my mind, it's south, but…
MIGNON: I’m doubting myself.
JOHN: I think Austria, south Austria, Jetson.
So there's something about using the word for the group to make it a little bit more intimate. That's fascinating.
MIGNON: Yeah, really cool. And you mentioned earlier theÂ
MIGNON: Never mind. I'm not going to display my geographical ignorance. I'm going to do a new lead.
JOHN: Yeah, I had to think really hard. We know it's very nearby. I do think they share a border.
MIGNON: German is one of the languages.
JOHN: Swiss German. Yep. Oh, absolutely. Yep.
MIGNON: Yeah. Okay. So going from German to Swiss German and other languages in Switzerland, you pointed out that Switzerland chose four words because it has four languages?
JOHN: Switzerland, famously neutral, has quite a bit of linguistic diversity. There are speakers of a dialect called Swiss German. There are many French speakers. There is Italian—lest we forget—Italy shares a border with Switzerland. And so Italian is spoken.
And then there's also a lesser-known but equally awesome Romance language called Romance, which I believe is a kind of descendant of Latin spoken, especially in Romanian. So the University of Applied Sciences in Zurich has four words of the year to reflect that language diversity. And each one of them does reflect a different concern for those population groups.
I'm probably going to butcher all these pronunciations, everyone. So send all of your emails, not to me. Okay. Thank you.
MIGNON: Send them to me.
JOHN: Swiss German. This is Unterschriftenbeschiss, which is signature scam. And that referred to a political scandal over there. That was the Swiss German one. In French, it was C'est le Feu, which is ceasefire. Now that brings up the Israel-Hamas conflict going on. So maybe not a familiar term, but a familiar concept. In the Italian choice, we say Non benario. Now, can you guess what that means?
MIGNON: No. Yeah.
JOHN: And this came up because of the very popular Eurovision Song Contest.
I believe the Swiss artist, Italian-Swiss artist Nemo won or did very well and apparently identifies as non-binary. And so non-Rio prevailed there. Finally, I don't know if I've ever said many Ramash words out loud. The word may not be familiar again, but the concept is segund morta. So "segund" sounds like "second," and indeed it is. It means "second home." The idea is that there are some people who are able to have not one, but two homes when many other people are struggling with housing. So those are four words from Switzerland. Now we talked before about polarization, and we feel that very acutely here in the United States.
In fact, so acutely that Merriam-Webster chose it as its word of the year. But it's not necessarily distinct to the United States; over in the Netherlands, the Van Dale dictionary, which I learned today is called the thick dictionary, or the "Dick of Andala," because it's many volumes. So it's thick. It shows the Dutch equivalent for polarization as its word of the year. And I promise you, this will be my last foreign language butchering. I believe the Dutch for polarization is pronounced "polarisatie" or something very similar to that. It's from the same root as polarization, which is vis-Ă -vis, Latin. So we've got some very distinct local concerns, such as scandals in Switzerland, but we also are not alone in technology and social media impacting our language, as well as politics, having its own challenges in our lives too.
MIGNON: Yeah, absolutely. Worldwide things going on. To wrap up on, again, on a more positive note, I hope, do you have some book recommendations that you could share with us? We love hearing about our guests' favorite books.
JOHN: Absolutely. So we talked about romanticy before, and this is not a romanticy novel, but it is often described as a kind of literary fantasy. I reread it this year, so I'm recommending a reread for me. It's a novel called Little Big by John Crowley, and the premise of the novel imagines, in very literary terms, what it would be like if fairies were real.
But it's not really about fairies per se, so if you're looking for Lord of the Rings, not as much, but if you like the idea of what it would be like if there were other worlds in our world, read this book. And what I love most about this book is some writers just have a quality; when you read them, you go, how is it possible that anybody wrote that way for that kind of magic?
So that's a novel that is near and dear to my heart that I would recommend. Not as widely known, but let's make it catch on more. I would also recommend a nonfiction work by the British classicist Mary Beard. A few years ago, she had a bestseller called SPQR in reference to the Roman slogan.
She's out with a new book called, Or maybe, I don't know when it came out, but it's new to me, called Emperor of Rome, and she is a very accessible, very thorough, very fun, very thoughtful writer. And in this nonfiction book, she takes this idea of, we all think we know what the Roman emperor was like, right?
So we're all walking around. Yes, Rome had its emperors, but she unpacks it and she goes, what did it mean for the actual ancient Romans? And this is a fun book for anyone who likes history. It's a fun book for anyone who likes language too, because all throughout the book, Mary Beard provides these fascinating pieces of evidence for how we know what we know, and so much of what we know about what was going on in the ancient world, especially the classical ancient world like Greece and Rome, survives on inscriptions, graffiti that soldiers left, or little writings or etchings that emperors and slaves—people would write in their palaces.
So it's just an extremely well-written book on an interesting topic. So John Crowley's Little, Big and Mary Beard's Emperor of Rome are just two of many recommendations.
MIGNON: Thank you. Those were great descriptions to help people understand if that book is going to be for them too. That was great. I love that.
JOHN: And they may not be for everyone. But there's something magical about good writing.
MIGNON: Absolutely. John, thank you so much for being here. John Kelly, etymologist, word lover extraordinaire. You can find him at mashedradish.com. Now, he already explained in the main segment why it's mashed radish. So if you're a Grammarpaloozian and you happen to be listening to this segment later, go listen to the end of the original show because it's a great story of why it's mashedradish.com.
John, thanks so much.
JOHN: It's part of my lore. Thank you so much for having me on.
MIGNON: I love that. It's part of your lore. That's great.