What would happen in a fight between Superman and Hyperman? Because the prefix "super" isn't so dominant anymore, odds would favor the yet-to-be-created comic-book character whose name would begin with "hyper."
France is the country in which "super" first lost its zip. The French were content with translating the 1933 American word "supermarket" as supermarche until 1963, when the Uebergrocer Carrefour opened its first hypermarche.
In 1970, The Guardian observed the creation of another of these huge stores across the Channel: "A proposed new `hypermarket,' a gigantic supermarket which could be the precursor of complete shops as big as whole villages."
When Americans use "hyper" as a slang adjective, we usually are shortening "hyperactive," meaning "high-strung, nervous in the service." As a prefix, it most often means "excessive, over and almost out," as in "hyperbole," from the Greek "to throw beyond," or the computer "hypertext," providing links extending far beyond the Web site.
The French, however, have given the "hyper" prefix a political connotation. Remember when the US was a mere superpower? That term was born just after World War I, as opponents of a League of Nations derided what a New York Times editorial called "a super-State, a super-Power." It was given currency in a 1944 book by a foreign-policy professor at Columbia University, W.T.R. Fox, predicting, "These world powers we shall call `super-powers,' in order to distinguish them from the other powers ... whose interests are great only in a single theater of power conflict."
French politicians faced a linguistic challenge: how to sneer at a nation that you think has grown too big for its superpower britches?
In February 1999, drawing on the supermarche-hypermarche analogy, Hubert Vedrine, then the French foreign minister, said that he would call the US a "hyperpower," which he defined as "a country that is dominant or predominant in all categories."
(Though those two words are often taken to be synonyms, "dominant" means "controlling"; "predominant" means "most influential at the moment." That was a nice distinction; prefixes count.)
Having recently split the UN Security Council by throwing down the gauntlet (a glove used as a challenge, not to be confused with "gantlet," a lane of punishment, as in "to run the gantlet" -- ah, skip it; sometimes distinctions ask too much), the Quai d'Orsay (the French foreign office) seems to have moved away from Vedrine's term.
The geostrategist Helmut Sonnenfeldt informs me that "hyperpower is used by intellectuals and the press, but President Jacques Chirac's foreign minister, Dominique de Villepin, who is a poet in his own right, hasn't used it."
The word, not yet in the major dictionaries, has a built-in raised eyebrow that its alternative phrase, "the world's only remaining superpower," just cannot manage. The Europhilic Financial Times reported this month that US President George W. Bush's "statement of intentions for the trans-Atlantic alliance was peppered with peace offerings to Europeans suspicious of the American hyperpower."
Relatedly, the notion of Europe-puissance -- "Europe as a power," put forward by Regis Debray, adviser to former French president Francois Mitterrand -- has often been shortened to Europuissance, with its meaning usually confined to "core" nations like Germany and France.
This may be a nonce term; the newspaper Le Monde held last month that the idea of Europe functioning as a counterweight to the US "requires abandoning the community's political correctness and saying that the idea of Europe-puissance is dead."
Now that "hyper" is looking down at "super," is there a prefix above both -- some "hyperlative" on the way? (That's one step up from "superlative," and is a term that Hyperman would use to describe his Lois Lane.)
Yes, a topper to both is way up there, coming on strong: ueber. The English "superman" was translated from the German "Ich lehre euch den Uebermenschen" -- "I bring you the Supermen," the word coined by the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche in his 1883 Thus Spake Zarathustra and popularized by George Bernard Shaw in his 1903 play Man and Superman.
In 1933, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster seized on Superman as the name of a villainous character created by a mad scientist, and five years later changed him to a hero in their strip for Action Comics.
"Ueber" means "over, above; ultimate; prototypical" but has taken on a pejorative connotation because of the Hitler-era use in the German national anthem, its first verse written in 1841: "Deutschland, Deutschland ueber alles, ueber alles in der Welt" ("Germany, Germany above all, above all in the world"). Chancellor Konrad Adenauer decided in 1952 that only the less-domineering third verse would be sung at official events.
"Ueber" has been adopted by fans of the TV show Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Michael Adams, professor of English at Albright College in Reading, Pennsylvania, and author of Slayer Slang, notes that teenagers have taken to "deploying ueber with abandon."
Newsweek's Anna Quindlen recently hailed Hillary Clinton as the "Ueberauthor." Patrick Sloyan, a former Hearst columnist, sends me this usage from the sports section of The Washington Post: "Coach Steve Spurrier's offense, like St. Louis', is tailored for a tailback with Ueberspeed."
Canada's Edmonton Journal hails the music created by a group called Coldplay as a combination of Led Zeppelin rock, '80s Manchester rhythms and '90s rave culture in an "ueber-danceable collision."
Thus have we come full linguistic circle: from Nietzsche's Uebermensch, to Shaw's Superman, to Vedrine's hyperpower and now -- after the subordination of "super" and the hyperventilation about "hyper" -- the re-emergence of "ueber" on top.
What's that up in the sky? It's a missile; it's a Stealth bomber -- no, it's Uebermensch!
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