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why not SQUUUSH?

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 and of course the ultimate SQUSHIEST, SQUUSHIEST and SQUOOSHIEST.
However, I see no mention that the one doing the SQUSHING would be the SQUSHER.  And my girlfriend pointed out that SQUSHABLE with all the other variants should also be words, but I see no trace of them, and they probably fall under the -Y adjectives instead.  Just to be silly, I will link to Squishable.com, which makes squushy animal-like toys.

The Urban Dictionary has a version of SQUSH meaning "to grope someone lovingly and non-aggressively".  Maybe that's the meaning that is responsible for the upturn in the last 20 years?  The Scrabble dictionary does not believe in the SQUSH variants, but the others are all there to play with.  You can see the squooshiest here.

I find this whole group rather comical, just a string of funny sounds that are perfect for odd situations.  If ever there was the sound of someone dropping down into a beanbag chair, SQUUSH.

They are obviously related to SQUISH and SQUASH (the verb).  Which brings up all those conjugations as well: SQUISHES, SQUISHING, SQUISHY, SQUISHIER, and the SQUISHIEST.

It's surprising how many words we have that are essentially the sound of smooshing something.  Like SMOOSH and SMUSH.  Often spoken with a gesture that fits the moment.  It branches out to slightly different impressions with related words like SCRUNCH, SQUEEZE, SMASH and MASH.  There is also MOOSH(-) which the Scrabble Dictionary rejects, but hey, it has another website full of smooshy toys, so let's leave it there.



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