If you were to distill 2016 down to one single word, what would it be?
The online Oxford Dictionaries picked “post-truth” as their word of 2016.
And in Austria at the University of Graz, they chose another compound gem: Bundespräsidentenstichwahlwiederholungsverschiebung.
Just looking at the 51-letter word makes you want to say “gesundheit.”
According to linguist Rudolf Muhr, who organized the vote for Austria’s word of the year, it means “postponement of the repeat of the runoff of the presidential election,” referring to Austria’s ballot this past year.
The vote between Austria’s more moderate Green Party and the far-right, populist Freedom Party was tulmultuous to say the least.
“All of a sudden we had this feeling again that it was 1930s coming back,” Muhr says.
The first vote in April resulted in a second round in May, which was then dismissed because of voting irregularities. Then another runoff scheduled for October was postponed again because of faulty glue on the ballots. Finally, a new vote happened earlier this December, and the Green Party’s Alexander Van der Bellen beat right-wing populist Norbert Hofer.
“People really got scared on the one hand and they wanted to express this feeling and wanted to say it should not happen again,” Muhr says. And this very, very long word perfectly expresses those complicated feelings, he says.
May 2017 be shorter and sweeter, Austria.