There ought to be a German word for it

I got a new phone recently, in part because I wanted to have a Bluetooth phone to sync with a new laptop I plan to purchase, as soon as Apple gets their sorry behinds in line and announces the new consumer Intel Macintosh laptop on hopefully Tuesday. After I stopped putting off setting up the sync and actually did it, I took a closer look at my address book in its current incarnation.

At this moment, I have some 809 cards in that database.

Data, data, always about the data. Much of this information started its life on my Palm III (was it an IIIe?), sometime right around Y2K. Since then, it moved to a Palm m130 and bounced variously between the Palm Desktop on Windows 95, 98, and 2000, gathering mass over time- though never on Windows XP. It moved to my Mac once I got it and started using a full-time laptop. By this time, I had been using my Palm less and less over the years- when it died the first time, I had a replacement screen via eBay and brought it back to life. The second time it died, I let it lay, accessing my information only on my computer. Tulane provided me with a Palm, so I got to using it again; a cellphone rounded out a home for data.

Post-Katrina, it seems needed and obvious to cull data. I don't need businesses that may no longer be open in a city five hundred miles away. I don't need client information from old tech support clients from two jobs previous. At least three people in my address book are now dead.

German has a great feature to make these wonderful portmanteau words that describe a complex emotion or situation. Maybe Weltanschauung-cart-angst. But English doesn't have a word for postponing the necessary culling of unneeded information due to old memories.