Word of the Week
60 articles
Word of the Week
VİBRATÖR /VIBRATOR
The word of the week is vibratör (vibrator), because Turkey has reached that stage of public life where even a small vibrating object of adult pleasure may require a prosecutor’s attention. Here, a vibrator is not merely a device; it is a small object with the bad manners to expose the size of the state.
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TAYT/TIGHTS
The word of the week is tayt, one of those treacherous little linguistic friendships the French call faux amis. It sounds almost like the English tights, though Turkish politely drops the final hiss.
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ŞATAFAT / POMP
The word of the week is şatafat, and Ankara supplied the visual aid. At the NATO summit, Turkey received its guests with the full vocabulary of Erdoğan-era grandeur: mehter music, ceremonial guards, a turquoise carpet that seemed designed less for walking than for being recorded, and the Erdoğan couple standing before the vast Presidential Complex, its doors polished to a shine usually reserved for furniture showrooms. There was also the choreography.
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DENİZ / SEA
For a country surrounded by seas, Turkey has made remarkably turbulent use of the name Deniz. It means “sea,” of course. Calm, blue, generous, occasionally treacherous.
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OPERASYON / OPERATION
The word of the week is operasyon, which is hardly surprising. Ahead of the NATO summit, Turkish authorities announced an operation resulting in hundreds of detentions.
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MEŞRUİYET/LEGITIMACY
My wicked editor and I have been on the phone constantly the last three days to exchange ideas on just what the word of the year should be. We toyed with “secret witness,” “active repentance” (read ratting out), “strategic autonomy,” “voice of the streets,” “angst,” and “normalization.” Finally, I used a columnist’s initiative and settled for meşruiyet, or legitimacy, over normalleşme/normalization.
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ŞİDDET/VIOLENCE
For me, this year, Nov. 26, the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women, arrived as a photograph. A staged one in which the woman’s face was hidden, but the hair defied all attempts at concealment. Sümeyye Akyol’s Domination, shown this week at young artists’ platform BASE at the Ritz-Carlton Residences, is built on fictional photographs using real women; mostly her friends and family.
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TEKİN
In Old Turkic, tegin was the stuff of inscriptions and dynasties, carved into the 8th-century Orkhon Inscriptions beside names like Kül Tegin. It meant prince, heir, royal son. However, Mahmud al-Kaşgarî, the first lexicographer of the Turkish language, reminds us that these gilded offspring referred to themselves as “kul,” or servant, when addressing their father in a ritual display of humility, claiming that “tekin” meant “humble servant.”
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TRİP YAPMAK
With TRIPP, the Trump Route for International Peace and Prosperity, dominating global headlines, it feels only right to turn our gaze to its Turkish near-homonym: trip atmak or trip yapmak. No, this is not another geopolitical acronym. In Turkish slang, trip is a native borrowing of English, stripped of tourist connotations and recast to mean sulky attitude. (Do watch the TikTok video for a full explanation) You can atmak (“throw”) a trip, a sudden sulk, or yapmak (“make”) one, meaning a longer, more orchestrated performance with a few dismissive or harsh words thrown in. Both have elbowed aside the more traditional surat asmak (“to pout”).
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YAKIŞIR
Some Turkish words are as sharp and clear as a gleam of a knife. Others confuse you. Yakışır is a particular gem in the latter category. Literally, it means “befitting” or “suits well.” But intonation does all the heavy lifting here. With a twinkle in the eye, yakışır becomes high praise: a friend gets a long-deserved promotion? “Yakışır!” A suave female CEO in her sixties starts dating a younger man with abs and ambition? “Yakışır vallahi!” But delivered with a dry brow and pursed lips, the very same yakışır morphs into biting derision, the sort you might lob at a corrupt bureaucrat who gets caught rigging tenders again or the son of one of the president’s close allies landing an ambassadorial job.
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FELAKET TELLALLARI
Before Twitter, there was the tellal: the Ottoman town crier. Walking and shouting past the wooden houses of the empire, he announced fermans (imperial edicts), grain prices, and fresh recruitments for the wars to come. Among these more theatrical criers was the felaket tellalı—literally, “disaster crier.” Think of him as a roaming mashup of breaking news, folk panic, and your neighbourhood uncle who thinks every cloud means war.
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YANGIN
I had every intention of writing about düğün/wedding this week. Who could resist, after all, the cinematic absurdity of Jeff Bezos’s Venetian wedding extravaganza? It was the sort of wedding you'd rage over for its sheer insouciance over war, poverty, and environmental concerns: a three-day floating carnival of tuxedoed billionaires, Brazilian butts and a $2,000 bottle of tequila airlifted across continents because, apparently, Venice no longer has liquor stores. The bride wore archival Dolce & Gabbana; Ivanka looked pretty in pink and a German-Turkish Bezos lookalike desperately wanted to meet the couple and present a wedding gift. I was far too ready to bitch about arrogant extravagance and muse on Turkish weddings, those long, loud, gold-pinned affairs where uncles compete in folkloric footwork and everyone pretends the damat's family is not agonizing over the costs…