-ussy

You probably feel that the Word of the Year for 2022 is done and dusted, but there is one more contribution to discuss. This is from the American Dialect Society who started the whole idea of Word of the Year in 1990.  They have a conference of linguists in early January where they ask the participants to vote for words in several categories.  The results are usually quite entertaining.

This year they voted for the suffix -ussy as Word of the Year.  Each year they explain:

Word of the Year is interpreted in its broader sense as “vocabulary item”—not just words but also phrases, compounds, and affixes. The items do not have to be brand-new, but they have to be newly prominent or notable in the past year.

The suffix comes from bussy, a gay slang word which combines boy and pussy, and refers to the anus. This word has been around for decades but somehow, perhaps with the mainstream drag queen shows, became popular in the last few years. This led to the word play in which -ussy is added to pretty well anything in the Twitterworld.  Ussification is the process of adding -ussy to words as a subversive way of destabilising language. If you can -ussy your words confidently then you are showing that you are in solidarity with the LBGTI community.

So join the revolutionussy and add this new suffixussy to your repertoire.