One 'died-in-the-wool' boomer's tricks for keeping up with Gen Z and millennial evolution of the English language. 

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Every Wednesday afternoon, I pick up a copy of City Weekly and open it to page 6 to read John Saltas' Private Eye. The column, which has run for years, draws on his Greek lineage, insider knowledge of all things Utah and the writer's no-holds-barred "saltussy."

Saltussy?

A full disclosure at this point will spare readers the bother of looking it up. The ink has not yet dried on the noun I coined by grafting "ussy" on the backside of "Saltas" to create the neologism, "saltussy." This practice of so-called "ussification" is so prevalent on TikTok and its ilk that "ussy" was voted the 2022 Word of the Year by the American Dialect Society.

In a press release, the respected academic organization called "ussy" a "playful suffix," useful for generating new slang. The Urban Dictionary describes "ussification" as an expression of the soul, passion or strength of someone's effort in a project or work of art or project.

Counting upstarts like "saltussy," the English language has roughly 170,000 words. And most people's vocabulary includes between 20,000 and 30,000 words. Which of the thousands we use—and how we connect them—is a factor in developing a distinctive voice. Two examples illustrate the point:

A friend's 19-year-old grandson emails updates from his Latter-day Saint mission to his friends and family. The young missionary reports on events like "a super cool baptism" alongside such misfortune as: "We woke up sick, which sucked."

In his 12th novel, Cormac McCarthy, now 89, describes a large person's butt as "wobbling away down the street like a sack of cats headed for the river."

Two distinctive voices, each as readily identifiable as an orange comb-over is to Donald Trump, or as the pock-pock-pock of a pickleball is to retired boomers seeking a foursome. The age gap separating the teenage missionary from the octogenarian novelist is an integral detail, I think.

While the English lexicon adds 1,000 or more words each year, there are probably just as many that disappear—many in step with generational turnover. The Greatest Generation used "bee's knees" to describe something surpassingly wonderful. In the 1960s, boomers ditched bees and embraced "bitching" as a superlative. (The Beatles and Rolling Stones were bitchin' bands. Cruising State Street in a Corvette was so bitchin'.)

Not long ago, millennials ran "awesome" into the ground, and Gen Z seems determined to do the same with "perfect." Given this constant lexical flux, it's interesting to take a few measurements now and then to map where we've been and where we're going. What happened to make "awe" into "awful" decades before "awesome" was worn out by millennials?

One metric is the Word of the Year (WOTY) selection. Each year, the dictionary companies choose a WOTY based on usage. According to the Oxford Dictionary, the word is meant to reflect "the ethos, mood or preoccupations of the past 12 months, one that has potential as a term of lasting cultural significance." Its 2022 choice was "goblin mode," slang for "a type of behavior which is unapologetically self-indulgent, lazy, slovenly or greedy, typically in a way that rejects social norms or expectations."

Collins Dictionary picked "permacrisis" as its WOTY. Defined as "an extended period of instability and insecurity, especially one resulting from a series of catastrophic events." The noun is dispiriting. Utah's share of the permacrisis is driven by drought, pollution, growth and the latest crusade du jour of its Republican overlords.

Merriam-Webster's decision to showcase "gaslighting" calls attention to our post-truth age. The verb has a long history; however, it has lately come to mean "the act or practice of grossly misleading someone, especially for a personal advantage." Its rise to prominence should surprise no one. After all, we live in a country whose previous commander in chief doubled as "gaslighter in chief," and who did so with impunity.

It is also not surprising that contemporaneous events affect the WOTY selection process. They can cause a spike in traffic on the dictionaries' websites which, in turn, causes a word to become a WOTY contender overnight.

One example in 2022 was the so-called "Wordle effect," a phenomenon related to The New York Times' online word puzzle of the same name. On a day when "homer" was the game's winning word, more than 64,000 people—most of whom were presumably unfamiliar with baseball—looked it up. The Cambridge Dictionary subsequently named "homer" the WOTY.

Another example is "woman." It was Dictionary.com's pick last year. It called to mind during the confirmation hearing of Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson, when Tennessee Republican Sen. Marsha Blackburn asked her to provide a definition of "woman."

"I'm not a biologist," parried Jackson. A woman is "an adult female person," says Dictionary.com, but "the word belongs to each and every woman—however they define themselves."

It is clear that self-definition will shape the evolution of "neopronouns" in English. To change pronouns—replacing the familiar "his" and "her" with the likes of "xe" and "fae"—will vex dyed-in-the-wool boomers like me. Three years have passed since "they" was Merriam-Webster's WOTY as a singular pronoun, but I still tend to default to "his" as I was taught in school.

Meanwhile, the argot of COVID-19 continues to dominate the discourse of the English-speaking world, according to the Global Language Monitor. The most-used word in 2022 was "denier."

Two words I looked up more than once—with rising alarm—were "chatbot" and "deadpool." The latter may soon describe a catastrophe at Lake Mead and Lake Powell, while chatbots seem poised to put us scribblers out of work, despite their unremarkable writer's voice.

As a first-time "ussifier," however, my personal WOTY was "saltussy." You can experience it firsthand when Private Eye returns to this space in the near future.

Private Eye is off this week. Send feedback to comments@cityweekly.net