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.”
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
Words mean what they mean. Changing the meaning of words is villainous behavior and is a function of institutional power unaccountable to the people.
Spain too, the similar organisation will accept words that ABSOLUTELY NO ONE USES like “coronababy” (wtf) and then not accept the -e termination as a neutral suffix for non-binary people or plurals.
I’m a prescriptivist when it comes to formal academic discussions. Attempting to discuss the definition of ‘communism’ with someone who isn’t using a definition based in at least cursory Marxist theory is an exercise in futility. Being an extreme descriptivist leads to ad agencies being able to dictate the terms of debate.
oh god cant wait for someone to yell “words change, don’t be a prescriptivist” because they’ve just used “Communism” to mean “1984 bad vibes”
