Daily Briefing


What's New?

The Politics page has been updated to reflect the winners of Pennsylvania's 2022 general election.

Medical examiner Kay Scarpetta is back! She's back in Virginia where nemeses old and new await. Author Patricia Cornwell reboots the series with Autopsy. Feel free to examine my review here.

One good Murder Mystery deserves another. But, is the second as good as the first? Check out my review of Murder Mystery 2 and find out.

We lost the great Tina Turner in late May. One of her many hits from back in the day is the Song of the Day for June.

Who says there ain't no cure for the summertime blues? The Billtown Blues Festival in early June may just do the trick.

Word of the Year

A panel of linguists has decided the word that best reflects 2022 is -ussy, a suffix used to create slang terms, primarily online.

The American Dialect Society chose the Word of the Year on January 6, 2023 during a gathering in Denver, Colorado. People were also allowed to join virtually.

Even though -ussy is not a stand alone word, it qualifies as Word of the Year material because the WOTY encompasses "vocabulary items," which include compounds, prefixes and suffixes.

"The selection of the suffix -ussy highlights how creativity in new word formation has been embraced online in venues like TikTok," said Ben Zimmer, chair of the American Dialect Society New Words Committee. "The playful suffix builds off the word pussy to generate new slang terms. The process has been so productive lately on social media sites and elsewhere that it has been dubbed -ussification."

Other nominees for WOTY included Dark Brandon; rizz, a short form of "charisma"; and quiet quitting, which refers to doing only the minimum amount of work needed to meet the requirements of your job. Quiet quitting did come away the winner in the Most Useful/Most Likely To Succeed category.

You can read about these and other winners in the complete news release here.