American Dialect Society makes ‘ussy’ suffix its word of the year
The suffix “-ussy” has been used in a variety of ways. Lil Nas X joked his ‘bussy water broke’ while promoting Montero, and Taron Egerton read a thirsty comment containing the word during a BuzzFeed video. (Lil Nas X/BuzzFeed)
The American Dialect Society named the suffix “-ussy” the 2022 Word of the Year, and the memes and jokes online are just glorious.
The collection of linguists, lexicographers, etymologists, professors, historians and scholars threw their combined academic acumenussy into debating and eventually declaring on Friday (6 January) that suffix was the word of the year.
Ben Zimmer, chair of the American Dialect Society’s New Words Committee and language columnist for the Wall Street Journal, said the selection of “-ussy” highlights how “creativity in new word formation has been embraced online in venues like TikTok”.
“The playful suffix builds off the word pussy to generate new slang terms,” Zimmer said. “The process has been so productive lately on social media sites and elsewhere that it has been dubbed -ussification.”
It should came as no surprise that people on social media put their whole effortussy into the memes and jokes.
Others highlighted how adding “-ussy” to the American Dialect Society’s lexicon was a major step forward.
Bussy has been all over the LGBTQ+ side of social media for ages, and it’s a term usually used by queer men to describe their own anatomy.
It certainly gained meme notoriety when Rocketman star Taron Egerton read out a thirsty tweet, which contained the term. One tweet that Egerton read during the 2019 segment said: “Taron Egerton is a white boy that I trust to destroy my bussy.”
Egerton was very confused and asked a person behind the camera what a “bussy” is before being shocked by the answer.
Lil Nas X joked his “bussy water” broke when delivering his stellar Montero album in a pregnancy-themed campaign.
Of course, the origin of “-ussy” goes far deeper than bussy. Bussy became a popular portmanteau online after the word “thrussy” (throat and -ussy”) started going viral on Tumblr.
There was also a suggestive meme video about Mr Krabs from SpongeBob SquarePants that went viral, which included a desire to see the character’s “krussy”.
Now, according to the American Dialect Society, -ussy can be “humorously attacked to many words”, and also “-ussification” can be used to describe the “process of creating new blended words with the -ussy suffix”.
In the past, the society named words like “insurrection”, “fake news”, “dumpster fire” and other topical vocabulary as Words of the Year.
