Last week I looked at British slang of the past. This week I am sharing some words from Europe and elsewhere that have been coined for the modern world, in which new technology is responsible for a lot of new slang.
Hungarian has a great word to describe watching films or TV shows on a phone – egérmozi, which literally means “mouse cinema”. And the Dutch word spookregen was coined for when a weather app tells you it’s raining but in reality it isn’t. It means “ghost rain”.
German has a word for someone who is old enough to use 18+ dating apps, Tinderjährig, which means, literally, “Tinder-years-old”. Tinderjährig rhymes with minderjährig, which is the German word for underage (so not yet old enough to use 18+ dating apps).
Another colourful German word related to smartphones is Knäckebrottelefonierer, a person who talks into their phone while holding it in front of their mouth as if they were about to eat a cracker. It means “crispbread phoner”.
I should also mention the meanings of some words for a computer – or what, in my house, is known as “the frustration box” (technology is not my strong point). The Icelandic word for a computer, tölva, means “number prophetess” or “number witch”. The Turkish word, bilgisayar, means “knowledge counter”. But in Austrian slang, a computer is sometimes called Blechtrottel, which means “tin idiot”.
The Welsh word for a laptop, gliniadur, merges glin, which is a shortened version of the Welsh word for a knee (pen-glin), and iadur, which is derived from the Welsh word for a computer, cyfrifiadur. So essentially a “kneeputer”. Another similar Welsh word for a laptop is sgrin-ar-lin, or “screen-on-the-knees”. Related English neologisms include the portmanteaus cyberchondriac (someone who compulsively searches the internet for symptoms of illness) and typochondriac (someone terrified of making typos).
There have also been numerous words coined as a result of growing awareness of climate change, such as the Swedish smygflyga, which is not admitting to taking a flight because of shame about carbon footprints. It means “sneak flying”. Its counterpart is tågskryta, which is proudly telling everyone you took the train instead, literally “train brag”. And the Norwegian word rekkeviddeangst describes the worry electric car drivers have about running out of power. It translates to “range anxiety”.
Finally, I should say something about the many words that popped up in response to the Covid outbreak and the resultant lockdowns, such as covidiot, for those not following guidelines, or the Cockney rhyming slang for the most valuable of lockdown commodities, Cheryl Cole. And as everyone was stockpiling those Cheryls (toilet rolls), a colloquial German expression for hoarding, “to hamster” (named for the hamster’s habit of storing food in its cheeks), gained worldwide popularity.
But I’m going to have to look beyond Europe again, as perhaps the most creative when it came to coming up with new pandemic terminology were the Australians. The rollout of the Covid vaccine in Australia was so famously slow in the early months, it led to it being called “the strollout”. The regular pandemic press conferences were referred to as “the daily depresser”’.
Melbourne (where I lived for over 10 years), and the rest of the state of Victoria, were in lockdown longer than anywhere else in Australia because of what was perceived as a lax initial approach to hotel quarantining. This led to the people of Melbourne being labelled Spice Girls, because everyone was trying their hardest – except Victoria.
PETER TRUDGILL IS ON SABBATICAL AND WILL RETURN SOON
