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
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"
I've literally had it happen before, which is why I mention it. That and with the concept of "Artificial Intelligence" which now apparently just means "glorified machine learning program" and not "sentience or even sapience demonstrated by machines". Descriptivism is the way casual conversations work, but in order for there to be ANY serious historical or academic understanding, there has to be a prescriptivist understanding of words as they were used and continue to be used as well, otherwise everything becomes indecipherable mush.
Should come as no surprise that a bunch of germans are all "Nein! Zis wort is not in ze Dictionary! It is zerefor wrong!"
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.
For babies born during coronavirus. Definitely a fancy word that the youngsters use and will be used in the future. Not like those silly non-binaries.
Words mean what they mean. Changing the meaning of words is villainous behavior and is a function of institutional power unaccountable to the people.
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?
A dialect doesn't have to be widely used to warrant being catalogued like this. This is fine, they could have easily just been pissy nerds over it lamenting how them youngins are ruining the language.
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)
That's not "lacking in social skills" that's establishing a new generational vernacular
bicyclecels
That's so not Bichael-pilled, and doesn't belong on an epic personal transit arc
me and my mates use -ussy offline all the time, and it was in that lizzo song
Just imagine the confusion in a few years when this slang is old and busted and nobody knows why it's in the dictionary.
All your base are belong to us. Democracy, whiskey, sexy!
I remember my days studying linguistics at university and I can for sure guarantee that linguists love this. It's easily searchable by just excluding everything that normally ends in -bussy abnd all the uses go straight into a database, like everything else said online. I'm pretty sure my old psycholinguistics professor must be dead by now, considering how old he was and how long ago it was, but this kind of data might make him crawl his way out of his grave.
