language

Spain’s word of the year, which you weren’t taught in school: dana

/ Sue Burke / Leave a comment
Photo of a street filled with cars washed up and destroyed in a flood.

English-language dictionaries and various wordniks have picked their words of 2024, including demure, kakistocracy, enshittification, brat, brain rot, Colesworth, manifest, and polarization.

In Spain, the Fundación del Español Urgente (Foundation for Urgent Spanish) was created by the Spanish Royal Academy and EFE, a news agency, to provide guidance for terminology used in the news media that might pose problems in grammar, meaning, or spelling. It also chooses a word of the year. This year the word is: dana.

Even if you know Spanish, you may have never heard of this word. It’s fairly new, formed by the acronym for depresión aislada in niveles altos (isolated depression at high levels). The World Meteorological Organization explains that it “often occurs during the autumn season because the remaining warm surface heat from summer meets a sudden cold invasion aloft from the polar regions. This leads to what meteorologists used to call ‘a cut-off system’ with low-pressure values that persist over a few days and rotating over the concerned region.” Warm air saturated with moisture meets cold air and becomes an intense, long-lasting storm.

In Valencia at the end of October, the result was devastating rainfall and horrific flash floods. More than 200 people died amid massive damage. There were big political consequences. Dana is Spain’s word of the year because of its importance.

Other candidates for Spain’s word of the year can tell us more about the year that was in that corner of the globe:

Fango (mud or slime): what the victims of the dana had to clean up — and what they hurled at politicians.

Inquiokupa: renters of apartments or homes who stop paying the rent intentionally and refuse to move out. Spain has a housing crisis, too. This, like dana, is a neologism.

Micropiso (micro-apartment): another newish housing-crisis word.

Mena: an acronym for menores extranjeros no acompañados (unaccompanied foreign minors), a newish term because Spain has immigration issues, too.

Narcolancha (narco-speedboat): a newish word invented because Spain has a drug-smuggling problem, too.

Pellet (pellet, also called nurdle in English): a word imported from English to describe the millions of tiny balls of raw-material plastic that washed up on Spain’s west coast in January.

Alucinación (hallucination): errors invented by AIs; as in English, a new meaning has been attached to an existing term.

Gordofobia (fat-fobia): a newish word for a world-wide phenomenon.

Reduflación (shrinkflation): another new word for what happens when the price stays the same but the product becomes smaller, another world-wide phenomenon.

Turistificación (touristification): a problem in many places, including Spain, especially Barcelona.

Woke (woke): another word imported from English, but it’s pronounced with two syllables, WOH-kay.

“When Star-Stuff Tells Stories” – now on sale

/ Sue Burke / 2 Comments

“If and when aliens make first contact, who should answer? Maybe humankind should turn to people like me, translators of science fiction. We’ve already thought through this kind of problem.”

That’s the opening sentences of my essay When Star-Stuff Tells Stories: Translating science fiction as a metaphor of technology and wonder. Calque Press has just published a limited edition of it as a 24-page pamphlet, and you can learn more and buy it here.

It’s one of a series of essays and other short works published by Calque. They’re meant to provide an opportunity for writers to think aloud about their own experiences and knowledge — and they are beautifully printed on high-quality paper. The publisher is fussy about the look and feel.

Here’s Calque’s description of When Star-Stuff Tells Stories:

Starting from the very earliest forms of human communication, the ways in which language developed into languages, and created the role of the translator, Sue Burke offers an invaluable guide to the importance and difficulties of translation on Earth, and gives us fascinating speculation about what might happen if we ever do come into contact with extraterrestrial intelligence. This pamphlet addresses questions of what communication is, and how the translator is uniquely positioned to work at escaping the bounds of the medium and bringing pure meaning into an intelligible form.