![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif?v=92.1){kind=small}
Contribute! | Policy | Philosophy
It's not often, I think, that English adds a new general-purpose prefix to its lexicon, but it seems to have done/be doing so in the case of the prefix "uber." I hear the prefix used now and then in conversation, although I've only rarely been able to catch exact cites. The usage tends to take the form of something like "We'll put all those terms into an uber-index." Today I caught Nancy Pearl saying the following on the local NPR station: "2002 was the year that his uber-realistic novel The Translator (one of my top ten books this year) was published."
Some casual Web searching turns up some sites (cites): Uber-mentor (referring to Peter Drucker); Uber auctions; Uber genealogy.
I hunted a bit in various sources, and the only concrete cites I can find are in the ever-useful Jargon File, which lists "ubergeek" (alternatively, "übergeek") as a "demigod programmer" (their words), a definition echoed in the Encarta Dictionary. And of course most dictionaries list the term closest to the prefix's origin, "Übermensch."
Über is German for "over" and is used in many contexts where in English we'd use the prefix "super" — for example, the aforementioned "Übermensch" is German for "superman," the German "überflüssig" means "superfluous," and so on.
There are a couple of interesting things going on here. One, as noted, is that we're borrowing the prefix when we already have one that we borrowed earlier from Latin. Another is that we've gotten rid of that pesky umlaut post-haste. It's also interesting to contemplate the semantics of the new prefix. Do people realize that "uber-" means essentially the same as "super-"? (Do most people know what "super-" means?) What rules to people use when using "uber-" in favor of "super-"? If a rule can be identified, does that suggest that "uber-" and "super-" actually have slightly different meanings?
PS [12/26/02] Just found this in Slate: "No one can doubt the key role of business investment in the uber-prosperity of the '90s. "
