There is a strange and cartoony clump of words centered around SQUISH, or the idea or sound of squishing things. This includes SQUUSH, SQUSH, and SQUOOSH, and an Ngram view of these shows all kinds of ups and downs in the noise of word history ... The first of these to appear was SQUSH, around 1830, and it was used in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, chapter 29. SQUUSH came about in 1850, peaked well below the others in 1970 and is headed down to obscurity these days, while SQUOOSH first gets a blip around 1880 and had a big upturn from 1950 to 2010, but it now sinking as, much to my surprise, SQUSH is taking off. Since these are all verbs, they have the full range of strange-looking endings which would be fun for a Scrabble night: SQUUSHED, SQUUSHES, SQUUSHING, SQUSHED, SQUSHES, SQUSHING, SQUOOSHED, SQUOOSHES, SQUOOSHING and can be turned into adjectives as SQUSHY, SQUUSHY and SQUOOSHY. OMG, it's never ending, there are comparative versions SQUSHIER, SQUUSHIER, SQUOOSHIER an
Comments
Post a Comment