This topic has become a traditional choice at the beginning of the year. Last year’s post provides a little background to the topic.

The word(s) of the year, sometimes capitalized as “Word(s) of the Year” and abbreviated “WOTY” (or “WotY“), refers to any of various assessments as to the most important word(s) or expression(s) in the public sphere during a specific year from: Wikipedia)

Another one of my favorite and recurring topics. Different dictionaries like Cambridge, Oxford, Merriam Webster, Collins, dictionary.com come up with WOTY lists every year. The ways they choose differ slightly and a brief summary of how they decide can be interesting for an introduction to the topic. Most dictionaries, though, choose the words that were looked up most frequently on their websites. The Wikipedia entry (above) describes some of them.

Here, finally, my World Cup 2014 post. We are looking forward to the next round, the quarter finals, Germany will play France on Friday – fortunately at the earlier time – many of us did not manage to watch the late games to the end. I was often unfortunate to leave the scene just before the first goal, but I heard I was not the only one. I looked into a lot of tired eyes last week, however, trafic was fairly low so I didn’t have to leave so early in the morning.

But now on to my vocabulary issue.

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The translation you get from googling ‘Sollbruchstelle’ is predetermined breaking point. However, when I googled that phrase to find out more, not much came up. In English, as I eventually found out, the phenomenon of manufacturers intentionally limiting a products lifespan is called ‘planned obsolescence’. A ‘pre-determined breaking point’ in any case is just one means to an end of achieving what the wider term of planned obsolescence describes. So from a linguistic point, one is the sub-category of the other, i.e. the two terms stand in a hierarchical semantic relationship to each other.

The Pons dictionary definition of ‘obsolescence’ is: the state of becoming old-fashioned and no longer useful (=becoming obsolete). ‘Planned obsolescence’ as a term encompasses more than just the printer that stops working after so and so many pages, but also marketing strategies of short lived fashion design (e.g. clothes and cars). Continue reading →

Would you like to find out how large your vocabulary is and/or get some extra vocabulary practice? Go to Vocabularysize.com and take the test created by researchers at Victoria University of Wellington.