the foreshortening of Berserkers to "Zerks".

If we look at the transition from Elder Futhark to Younger Futhark, we lose a whole eight letters, and there's lots of dissertation-length ideas as to why that amputation occurred, and how that makes later translations of this truncation in Old Norse compared to Proto-Norse such a pain ... but that's not the linguistically deep can of worms I want to open here.

What I want to draw your attention to is this one instance below of how language organically evolves to use foreshortening, abbreviations, and contractions for convenience's sake, plus how generational change in language happens to create subcultural exclusion, delineate age-group differences, and just to sound "cool".

Now, I'm not recommending the tween graphic novel series Barb: The Last Berserker by any means. In fact I only read the first 20 pages or so before I put it down, but during my shallow preview of its low-end juvenile-target art and flip self-aware camp fantasy trope dialogue I ran across the very clever foreshortening of Berserkers to Zerks and all the above occurred to me that just maybe there was a single bit of potentially useful lingual evolution happening in this kids' chonky chapterbook hardback series.

NorsePlay hopes for a revival of the bear shirts, and just maybe then we can also use the word Zerk/Zerks, so I'm writing this entry just to stick a pin in that for us future Zerks.

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Guillermo Maytorena IV knew there was something special in the Norse Lore when he picked up a copy of the d'Aulaires' Norse Gods and Giants at age seven. Since then he's been fascinated by the truthful potency of Norse Mythology, passionately read & studied, embraced Ásatrú, launched the Map of Midgard project, and spearheaded the neologism/brand NorsePlay. If you have employment/opportunities in investigative mythology,  field research, or product development to offer, do contact him.