“Baby elephant” is word of the year

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“Baby elephant” is the Austrian word of the year 2020, and by a large margin the symbol for the minimum distance to avoid SARS-CoV-2 infection.

The second place was already taken by “Corona” itself. The expert jury, headed by Rudolf Muhr from the “Gesellschaft für Österreichisches Deutsch” (GSÖD – Society for Austrian German language), justified the choice, which was made in cooperation with the APA – Austria Press Agency. In third place was the ambiguous “verblümeln”, according to the jury an “ironic play on words with the name of the current Minister of Finance Gernot Blümel meaning ‘to gloss over’, ‘idealize’, ‘to play dumb’, but also ‘to calculate the budget'”.

Wording of the year
In 2020, it was a lot tighter when it came to nuisance words, although the virus was also involved here. The victory went to the “Corona Party”, “as a term for the gathering of groups of people who meet in private or public environments despite the state-imposed curfew. A term that was mostly used in a negative context in the media, but also in a trivializing to ironic context in the private sphere – an ambivalence that helped it to first place, thus putting “social distancing” in second place behind it. Third place went to the versatile “coronabedingt” (“corona-conditioned”), according to the jury a “seemingly harmless term that expresses a certain inevitability”.

The youth word of the year, “Boomer”, refers to the generation of baby boomers, i.e. “those who came into the world after the Second World War until the end of the 1960s”, explained the jury. With the phrase “Ok, Boomer”, young people are able to “express their view in the current generation conflict” with only two words, the jury said in its statement. With “lost”, a keyword for “not knowing one’s way around, being completely on the sidelines, perplexity or indecisive behavior” made it to second place.

Saying of the year
The “Schleich di, du Oaschloch” by an unknown Viennese became the red-white-red slogan of the year, calling after the terrorist in Vienna who killed four people and injured numerous others on November 2. “We will soon have the situation in Austria, too, that everybody knows somebody who died of Corona” closes the circle and has been chosen as the slogan of the year. By the way, the word of the year 2019 was “Ibizia”, the unword “b’soffene G’schicht”, “Schweigekanzler” and “Datenschutzgrundverordnung” the year before.