Austria's 52-letter word of the year

[lindysalsagal]

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/austrias-word-year-has-52-letters-180961375/

Austria’s Word of the Year Has 52 Letters

Bundespraesidentenstichwahlwiederholungsverschiebung isn’t just a mouthful—it tells an annoying political story

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Austria’s Word of the Year Has 52 Letters
Bundespraesidentenstichwahlwiederholungsverschiebung isn’t just a mouthful—it tells an annoying political story
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By Erin Blakemore
SMITHSONIAN.COM
DECEMBER 9, 2016

Bundespraesidentenstichwahlwiederholungsverschiebung. It has a ring to it, doesn’t it? Try it out for yourself: Bundespraesidentenstichwahlwiederholungsverschiebung. To an English speaker, it may seem like a meaningless, even endless assortment of letters, but it turns out that it’s an award-winning German word. As the Associated Press reports, a survey of 10,000 Austrians has chosen the lengthy noun as its word of the year.

Roughly translated, the word means “postponement of the repeat runoff of the presidential election.” The super-long word was coined this year in response to a similarly drawn-out presidential election in Austria.

In May, Austrians elected Alexander Van der Bellen to the presidency in May. But Van der Bellen’s victory was a narrow one, and the Freedom Party of Austria (FPÖ), the country’s far-right party, contested the results and claimed that voting irregularities warranted a new election. The repeat runoff was due to go ahead on October 2, but then something sticky happened. As The Guardian’s Kate Connolly reports, the government requested a postponement of the repeat runoff when issues with the glue used to seal mail-in ballots were discovered. The election was postponed and a new term was born.

[Igel]

1. We think too highly of orthography.

"The Graduate Student Association Forum charter revision subcommittee chair said that the revision process was not a success" contains three nouns: The first is 73 letters long (under German orthographic rules, and unless I miscounted). The sentence contour shows that the first noun is long. The second noun is "revision process". Leaving the third noun as "success."

There's this latinate tradition in English grammar to somehow think of those first string of words as somehow not forming a compound. It's not the best analysis, it's just the tradition. At its heart, English is still Germanic.

To a Romance speaker, such compounds are a mess. To a native speaker, we parse them without much thinking about it. Personally, the German term isn't so much a separate lexical item as something repeatedly formed for the occasion.

Like "voting irregularity" or "repeat runoff".