"Klimakatastrophe" (climate catastrophe) is the Word of the Year 2007 chosen by the Society for the German Language, notes Deutschlandfunk. The word of the year is supposed to say quite a bit about public debates. In the last two years, the chose the words "Fanmeile" ("fan mile," referring to the public viewing and celebrating spaces during the Soccer World Cup in Germany in 2006) and "Bundeskanzlerin" (the female version of the word "chancellor"). 

Americans had the chance to vote in Merriam-Webster's Word of the Year contest until Friday. The results are not in yet. I have no clue what seven of the candidates mean:

Apathetic, babymoon, blamestorm, charlatan, conundrum, cruft, eleemosynary, facebook, hyprocrite, linkability, melancholy, Pecksniffian, pretentious, pugnacious, quixotic, sardoodledom, sputum, subpoena, vanity_sizing, and wOOt.

I assume that there are many Word of the Year contests in the United States. Please post information of other contests and your own favorite Word of the Year 2007 in the comments section.

Or we could have our own contest: What was the most interesting or most important word used in transatlantic debates on Atlantic Review and in the real world in 2007? "Caveats" (i.e. national restrictions on military mandates in Afghanistan) or "Pro-American" (referring to Merkel's and Sarkozy's policies) or something else???

I love the 2006 winner of the American Dialect Society contest: "Plutoed." CNN explains the meaning.

Swissinfo reports that "Sterbetourismus" (death tourism) has been selected from over 2,000 suggestions as Word of the Year 2007 in German-speaking Switzerland.

Check out last year's Atlantic Review post: World Press Photo and Word of the Year: Grief and Truthiness

So it happened. The Germans let loose. Eventually, they didn't win the World Cup, but they decided to bare it all anyway. And have fun like there was no tomorrow. Everybody did it in his or her own way. Within 90 minutes of the first match Germany played, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, for example, went from being the queen of lifeless frowning to the people's princess of boundless jubilation. The rest of the country, apparently, watched, cheered and then got busy in the sack.
"More births nine months after such an event are surprising only at first sight," said Rolf Kilche, who is a head of a large birth clinic in Kassel. "The attitude to one's own body and the role of the hormones are often underestimated. If you're in a good mood, you are more likely to get pregnant." These days birth training courses in Germany are getting overbooked. Some hospitals are even planning to offer additional courses in March and April.

A few more World Cups and blackouts and Germany's demographic problems are solved.

According to my research, "football" is very popular among my fellow Americans. It sort of resembles chess, but with a lot more physical contact. Today is, like, the biggest day of the year for football enthusiasts.

inverted nationalism for people who think nationalism isn't cool. (think about it, what better way to believe in the superiority of your nation without being explicit about it?)

While 71 percent of Americans say they are "very proud" to be in America, only 38 percent of the French and 21 percent of the Germans and the Japanese say they are proud to live in their countries. And Americans are much more committed to individualism than are people elsewhere. Only one-third of Americans, but two-thirds of Germans and Italians, think that success in life is determined by forces outside their own control. (...) Americans typically have a low opinion of our governing institutions, especially Congress, but an exceptionally high opinion of the constitutional system of which they are a part.

Soccer is the perfect game for the post-modern world. It's the quintessential expression of the nihilism that prevails in many cultures, which doubtlessly accounts for its wild popularity in Europe.

My theory is that Americans have neither the belief system nor the temperment for such a sisyphean sport as soccer.  We are a society of doers, achievers, and builders.  Our country is dynamic, constantly growing, and becoming ever bigger, richer, and stronger. (...) I think it reflects the static, crimped, and defeatest attitudes held by so many of the other peoples on earth.

BAD NEWS FOR AHMADINEJAD AT THE WORLD CUP: "Did you ever think you'd see the same people waving Israeli flags and singing Deutschland über alles?"
No, but I wouldn't want to get on their bad side...

When it came to the national anthem and its opening line "Deutschland, Deutschland über alles", so often accompanied by uncertainty and shoe-gazing, much of the 65,000-strong crowd rose to their feet and joined in, as did the national team.

Combine the Super Bowl's hype, the rising cool factor of the NBA finals and the quaint charm of the World Series, and it still wouldn't come close to the World Cup's euphoric atmosphere.  "They're putting on an incredible show for the World Cup," U.S. captain Claudio Reyna said Friday, a day after the Americans were eliminated. "The way the tournament's been run and the games, everything, it's really becoming one of the great World Cups ever, and the German people have been really amazing. You can see that every day is just an amazing party throughout the country," Reyna added. "It's been really a lot of fun for all of us."
Fans fill the streets laughing, singing, whistling and having an infectious good time. People wear their flags and colors with pride, and there's friendly banter between fans from opposing countries. Aside from a few minor incidents, there's been little of the feared hooligan violence so far. Restaurants are hopping, shops are bustling and train stations are party central.

The journey, led by a couple of drummers, will last more than two miles. Traffic stops. Germans pause along the sidewalks and take out their cell phones to snap photos. They salute the Americans, offering a thumbs-up or a smile. Those stuck in their cars while the Americans pass through have varying reactions. Some look frightened; others roll down their windows for handshakes and high-fives. The American fans are now a spectacle. The parade, which started with about 200 fans, reaches about one city block deep. And the Americans don't stop their singing when they enter the subway stations, continuing during the brief train ride to the stadium. (...) Earning one point in the World Cup is anything but impressive. But creating a home-field edge against the Italians and stopping traffic in a metropolitan city is quite a feat for Americans.

A delegation of 30 young soccer players participating in the World Cup Sports Initiative organized by the U.S. State Department will travel to Germany June 21-23 to attend the FIFA World Cup match between Ghana and the United States and engage in program activities in Nuremberg and Frankfurt (Main). The boys and girls, ages 13-18, represent the following 13 countries: Afghanistan, Bahrain, Bolivia, China, Indonesia, Lebanon, Malaysia, Morocco, Nigeria, Pakistan, South Africa, Uganda, and Uzbekistan. U.S. Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs Karen Hughes will join the young soccer players in Nuremberg to attend the Ghana-USA game on June 22.

Eddie Johnson says he sees similarities between his team and the soldiers he will be surrounded by when the United States stays in the Ramstein Air Base for Saturday's match against Italy in Kaiserslautern. "It's like us in the World Cup," the 22-year-old Johnson told reporters in Hamburg. "We're here for war. We came here to battle. We came here to represent our country. Whenever you put your jersey on and you look at your crest and the national anthem's going on, and you're playing against a different country, it's like you do or die, it's survival of the [fittest] over 90 minutes-plus."

is one of the organizers and appreciates feedback from any potential participants by June 11th, "so we won't suddenly run out of beer… (If you should desire to make a – voluntary – financial contribution, a short notice is also most welcome.)" Stephan was a Fulbrighter at the University of Texas at Austin in 1985/86 and can be reached at "stephan AT texasexes.de"
 
2. Understanding German-American Differences and U.S. exceptionalism!
Fulbright Alumnus Andrei S. Markovits is the author of Offside: Soccer and American Exceptionalism  / Im Abseits. Fussball in der amerikanischen Sportkultur. I have not read this book, but his other books on Germany and U.S.-German relations are very good and easy to read for non-experts as well.
Markovits is a renown political science professor at Ann Arbor and currently the Gambrinus Visiting Professor of Soccer and Sport Studies at the University of Dortmund. He will lecture about "Soccer in America: Unique among American Sports, Unique in the International Arena of Team Sports" at the Free University of Berlin's John F. Kennedy Institute on June 13, 2006, 2:00-4:00 PM.
Prof. Markovits explains on his homepage:

Soccer is the world's favorite pastime, a passion for billions around the globe. In the United States, however, the sport is a distant also-ran behind football, baseball, basketball, and hockey. Why is America an exception? And why, despite America's leading role in popular culture, does most of the world ignore American sports in return? Offside is the first book to explain these peculiarities, taking us on a thoughtful and engaging tour of America's sports culture and connecting it with other fundamental American exceptionalisms. In so doing, it offers a comparative analysis of sports cultures in the industrial societies of North America and Europe.

The U.S. may not even make it to the round of 16 this time, but that will be a minor setback. As Wells failed to note, was it over when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor? No. We eventually won that one too.

I never saw soccer as a young boy. We didn't play it where I was from. It just didn't exist. I can't even -- I'm thinking about all the -- between age six, when I can remember sports, and 12 or 13, I just never saw soccer being played. And so there's a generation of us that really weren't fanatic. There's a new generation of Americans that did grow up on soccer. And there's obviously a huge interest amongst that crowd in the World Cup. And some of us older guys are now beginning to understand the significance of the World Cup around the world.

Registration on U.S. Youth Soccer Association teams climbed approximately 90 percent to nearly 3.2 million players in 2002-03 from 1990-91. The number of adult soccer players has also increased approximately 80 percent to more than 5 million since 1987. Statistics also show that while interest in other sports is declining, there is increasing interest in Soccer. The number of total Soccer participants (6-years plus) in 2003 was 17,679,000.

An estimated 3 million fans from around the world will attend the games, and vast numbers of them are expected to buy sex as a form of entertainment. As many as 40,000 additional women are expected to be added to the approximately 400,000 women in Germany’s sex industry. Germans are accommodating the trade in women by facilitating the construction of mega-brothels and "sex huts," and cities hosting the games will issue special permits for street prostitution, creating a virtual partnership with brothel owners, pimps and traffickers.