Bring your own bottle

There are many things about Swiss society that I have been rather slow to grasp and to understand, not least of which has been the popularity of the Swiss-German Word of the Year competition.

The idea is that a group of academics and journalists sit down and decide which one word has singularly defined the year. Previous contestants have included “Aldisierung” in 2005 – or the Wal-martification of Swiss consumer society – and Spuckaffaere of 2004 in which Alex Frei spat on an English soccer player.

It probably says more about the quality of media coverage than anything else that an entire year’s news output can be overshadowed by one word, but then that is the power of the modern media for you. Now that I understand the rules of the game, I think I have identified this year’s winner only eight months into the year: Botellon.

Botellon is a Spanish word which means to use social networking tools to organise an impromptu party of mainly teenaged drinkers who gather in public spaces apparently spontaneously, drink enormous amounts, carouse into the early hours of the morning and then go home leaving behind nothing but trash and empty bottles.

Its popularity in the media comes from the fact that it combines two of the industries’ favorite pastimes – binge drinking and the use of Facebook – creating an irresistible cocktail of mock outrage, amusement and debauchery that is guaranteed to annoy the conservatives, outrage the liberals and sell some newspapers during the slow summer months.

The pictures were fairly predictable: kids in parks slamming down bottles of the kind of sticky liquor that masks the taste of alcohol. A trail of devastation left in their wake. Fairly normal sight on the streets of a British city. In Switzerland, it prompted an uproar.

Swiss authorities rushed last week to attempt to ban the practice, fearful that the gilded youth of Geneva and Zurich could overwhelm local police forces with their unplanned parties and inundate hospitals with the after effects thereof. But since drinking is allowed from the age of 16 onwards in Switzerland, there appears to be very little left that they can do to stop it.

After years of rolling their eyes when contemplating the debauchery of British society, it seems that the problems of binge drinking might slowly be making themselves felt in normally staid Swiss society too. At least some Swiss realise that attempting to ban it will only make it appear more appealing.

A sociologists in Zurich pointed out that outrage about drinking fuels more drinking and the more that the media write about it the more people will want to go. One natural weapon that Switzerland has, of course, is the weather: while British teens are famed for staggering drunkenly around parks in their t-shirts in the depths of winter, their Swiss counterparts are unlikely to last as long: come October the prospect of a botellon in a cold, damp park will feel fairly unappealing. It might work year-round in Spain, but in Switzerland this botellon has a shorter shelf-life.