https://twitter.com/americandialect/status/1611699585193508864
The American Dialect Society, in its 33rd annual words-of-the-year vote, selected the suffix “-ussy” as the Word of the Year for 2022. More than two hundred attendees took part in the deliberations and voting, joining both in person and virtually, in a hybrid event hosted in conjunction with the Linguistic Society of America’s annual meeting.
Presiding at the Jan. 6 voting session was Ben Zimmer, chair of the ADS New Words Committee and language columnist for the Wall Street Journal.
“The selection of the suffix -ussy highlights how creativity in new word formation has been embraced online in venues like TikTok,” Zimmer said. “The playful suffix builds off the word pussy to generate new slang terms. The process has been so productive lately on social media sites and elsewhere that it has been dubbed -ussification.”
For more on the -ussy phenomenon, see the Vulture article by Bethy Squires, “We Asked Linguists Why People Are Adding -Ussy to Every Word”: “Riffing off ‘bussy’ (a portmanteau of ‘boy’ and ‘pussy’), now everything is a cat or a cavity. A calzone is a pizzussy. A wine bottle has a winussy.” See also Michael Dow’s scholarly paper, “A corpus study of phonological factors in novel English blends.”
I think I dislike this. Like, does anybody actually talk that way? Online maybe, but is descriptivism meant to capture written or spoken language? Also, to what extent is the value of a descriptivist perspective on language degraded by online spaces in which a relative minority of weirdos are mutating words and phrases at rates heretofore unseen in humans?
I think I dislike this. Like, does anybody actually talk that way?
zoomers are lacking enough in social skills that they use words like this IRL
(I have heard zoomers say stuff like “bicyclecels” and adding “-cel” as a suffix to stuff IRL)
Honestly, hats off to them for being descriptivists and going “hey look at this cool new thing”. Every similar organisation here over in germany is either reactionary prescriptivists or out of touch boomers nominating words no one’s ever heard of
Wordcels get -ussy pilled.
