During the otherwise Nietzschean abyss of the early pandemic, one of the few bright lights was a German word:
Hamsterkauf, which first emerged during World War II and began circulating in German media last March. Literally “hamster buy,” this coinage described the act of succumbing to our basest animal-brain instincts to hoard more necessities than we would ever actually need, much like the eponymous rodent’s proclivity to stuff its bucktoothed visage until its overfed little keister gets stuck in a tunnel and it suffocates.*
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Ah, those delightful Germans! Always with the single word that describes a very specific thing that any normal language would never have a single word to describe! Well, unsurprisingly, the