Vacunadrome, chosen “strange word” of the year (and what were the other finalists)

The pandemic has changed our lives, the way we relate and, of course, our way of speaking.

So much so that we have created new words that are already part of our daily speech, although they are not yet formally collected in dictionaries. This has happened with “vacunódromo”, chosen as “word” of the year by the magazine semicolon.

This publication, which is the bulletin of the Spanish translators of the institutions of the European Union, has held the contest since 2012 “The word of the year”.

To participate there are several requirements. The first, to be a “wrong or bizarre word”, which agrees with the definition of “word” given by the Royal Academy of the Spanish Language. The other norm is that they have a repetitive use in the media, politics or the administration, as they appear in the simple rules of 2012.

The magazine readers they are the ones who send their proposals every year with a justification that supports the candidacy of the word in question.

“Vacunadrome”

For puntoycoma magazine, the word of the year has flooded the media and “It is shocking at first.”

The letter of presentation of his candidacy is that it is a “sadly famous and necessary term, and it is also badly formed” in contrast to others such as “vaccinated“, used in Latin America, or” vacuguagua “, used in the Canary Islands, in Spain.

Given the extension of its use in the media, the Fundéu (Foundation for Urgent Spanish) picked up this neologism last March. He defines it as “large facilities enabled to vaccinate.”

It is a neologism formed from the noun vaccine and from the cultured base -dromo. This last part, -dromo, appears in other terms such as racecourse The velodrome, and that “generally it alluded to places in which races took place”.

“Today it also refers to the large-sized space destined for specific purposes, such as a cosmodrome, rock-track, and in this specific case, the mass administration of vaccines“, qualifies the Fundéu in the article.

Regarding its rules of use, the Fundéu points out that it conforms to the Spanish guidelines and that its meaning is transparent, so it is not necessary to write it in italics or in quotation marks.

On the other hand, it is also correct to use the word vaccinatory, which is used in certain countries of America and which appears in the Dictionary of Americanisms, to refer to this type of place.

The other candidates this year

Climate change, more pandemic and the volcano that erupted in La Palma (Canary Islands) are the issues surrounding the finalists for “word of the year” 2021.

Among those related to the La Palma volcano, is faience, a flat terrain at the foot of slopes or escarpments, commonly formed by materials detached from the heights that dominate it and pyroclasts, which is any solid fragment of volcanic material ejected through the eruptive column thrown into the air during a volcanic eruption.

Also appeared coladas, in reference to the mass of lava that moves, until it solidifies, down the slope of a volcano and that, even the phenomenon of the volcano, was used to refer to putting the washing machine.

They also collect as a curious phenomenon of the year the use of toxic not as an adjective, but as a noun. For example: “On La Palma now there are toxins in the air”.

Trash, used to designate human waste abandoned in nature, entered the contest because, say the organizers, “although it is not a strictly new word, it has become widely disseminated in 2021.”

Verrano it is the mixture of the words summer and autumn. It is born by the extension of high temperatures to autumn times.

Pandemial, understood as “belonging to the generation born or raised in this stage” of the pandemic.

Smooth, a word used by many to refer to “swab”, the test done with a sanitary swab to detect, in this case, whether or not you have covid-19.

mechagenemia, expression of extreme annoyance “before the global paranoia organized around the happy virus.”

Other candidate words were portacoz of the play on words between spokesman and kick, violent shaking that beasts make with one of the legs; demotanasia, a reference to the loss of population in the interior of Spain and that arises from the words demography and euthanasia; or virtuceno “on the subject of this virtual age, without place or time, in which we live”.

The winners of previous editions

Last year the winner was, as in this edition, a word related to the pandemic: witho birthday.

It was proposed by the students of Translation and Interpreting at the University of Alcalá (Spain) and is, according to the jury, “a fun combination between the word” birthday “and the name of one of the most used virtual communication platforms throughout 2020 to keep in touch with ours. “

The winner of the first edition of this contest, in 2012, was austerity, used “to designate death by austerity; excessive, it is understood.”

In 2018 he won viejenial, “an older person who wants to look like a millenial and in 2017 the overwhelming winner was fake news, fake news, which won the podium not only in this contest, but also for the Oxford dictionary, which reviewed it as the word of the year.

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