Word of the Day, or The Illusive Five-Syllable "Or"

Last night in German class, we encountered the word beziehungsweise, abbreviated bzw, which, according to my German teacher, means "or." I was initially upset by this syllabic imbalance (5 to 1!) but my discomfort soon gave way to fascination with the five-syllable "or."

Beziehungsweise means, alternately, "alternatively," "and...respectively," "as the case may be," or "or rather." We have combinations of words that serve the same function in English but none in exactly the same way. For example, if you want to say: "The 2000 and 2004 Presidential elections were respectively disheartening and terrifying," then you need both the adverb "respectively" and the conjunction "and." In German, the single conjunction placed between the adjectives "disheartening" and "terrifying" would suffice.

The word literally means "related-wise" or "concerned-wise," built from the noun "concern" -- beziehung -- and the German equivalent of the suffix "-wise" -- weise, which means "wise" as in "intelligent" in German just as it does in English. Revising our previous example, we get: "The 2000 and 2004 Presidential elections were disheartening andrelatedwise terrifying."

In any case, equating beziehungsweise with "and...respectively" does balance out the count: 5 to 5. And the five-syllable "or" is still at large.