Recommendations of the Editorial team
Older people in particular (often from the media industry) throw themselves with verve into the “youth word of the year” every year. As if it offered insight into a mysterious world that would otherwise remain hidden from adults. Strangely enough, you often hear from teenagers that they have never heard these words before.
Content creator Levi Penell therefore launched the “Boomer Word of the Year” some time ago as a counter-event. What terms do younger people associate with the older generation?
This year, “Chat Tschibidi” won the race, an onomatopoeic distortion of the name of the AI chat program used by the vast majority of Germans. Undoubtedly also an attempt to show the mixture of late-adolescent enthusiasm and fatal ignorance that older people approach such programs with.
Other “winners” in the raffle for the “Boomer word” of the year are “Hope (whale)” – meaning Timmy, the stranded Baltic Sea whale –, “Juno/Julei” (similar to “to the pencil”), “Slacker” and “Sonnabend” (instead of Saturday). “Advertising” (instead of advertising) also made it into the ranking.
A swipe at the boomer show “Tagesschau”
Levell presented the result in a Tagesschau look, also to point out that the most important German news program focuses on topics such as “youth word of the year” as if this would actually provide some insight into the country. Recently, even former ARD employees criticized the selection of topics on the “Tagesschau”, such as a report about a reopened cult café in Berlin.
To his action explained the 25-year-old Levell: “It’s a satirical answer to the youth word of the year. Because for a long time we had the feeling that the boomers wanted to explain to us what youth language was. And often they were words that we hadn’t even heard as a young person.”
In the past, the passive-aggressive “Sportsfreund” (2024) and the birth year synonym “Year of Construction” (2025) were chosen as “Boomer Word of the Year”. Words like “Göttergatte” and “Rambazamba” were also included in the raffle.
What does boomer actually mean and what do young people criticize?
Boomer is a derision of the generation term Baby Boomer, i.e. the baby boomer generation between 1946 and 1964. Younger people associate the boomers with a generation that always knows everything better and has largely become the winner of prosperity in times of low crisis, without letting the next generation share in it.
Specifically, boomers are accused of having accumulated assets, real estate and prosperity in times of economic miracles and secure pensions – and at the expense of the environment. As a result, younger people today have to contend with skyrocketing rents, stagnating wages and the burden of shrinking pension funds.
Another accusation against boomers is their workaholic idea of work, which is also required of younger people. Not to be forgotten: Boomer also acts as a synonym for people with conservative, unreflective views, which are always presented in a know-it-all tone (“You can just buy a house if you work hard enough”).