Zhoozh

I was today years old when I learned that zhoozh (/ˈʒʊʒ/) comes from Polari. To zhoozh means more than to improve, it means to improve by adding that little something special™. I use it exclusively when talking about soups.

Different competing ways of spelling it exist: jeuje, jush, zhoosh.

However, I still think that we should adopt the Polish way here: żuż. It's short, it's phonetic, it has two cute little eyes, it's something I can show to my UK-born friend next time he repeats his joke about the liberal use of consonants in Polish. They're free, Giles, they're free, it was the 20th century geopolitics that made our economy suffer, not the fact that we're consonant floosies!

At the same time, perhaps jeuzhe should be that one special zhoożed up word that has no established way of spelling. Instead of fighting stupid wars about gifs and jiffs we could embrace the cold tungsten-solid truth that no one really knows: what the true spelling of jüj is, where do all of those letters come from and what's their agenda. Do they come in peace? Can we trust them? Have I spent the past 5 hours trying to fix and reverse-engineer a 3 year old Unity project while waiting on the line to file my tax return for a country I'm not a resident of and I feel like I haven't learned anything today?

Yes, but I don't understand how this is relevant. I feel like you're not paying attention. Now, imagine this prescriptivist nightmare: we don't only allow for all possible ways of spelling żooozh, but we insist that every time we use it, it must be spelled differently. No two rzusz-eš are the same. Every single one is unique, ژوژ-ed up above and beyond the previous one. You can mix languages, writing systems, you can even use Asemic Writing as long as the shape and rhythm of your creation conveys the essence of its meaning: the improvement, the excitement, the öömph (uttered with a deep voice by a steam bun-faced bald man with a handlebars moustache and a hand tied bowtie).

Now every time you see a word you don't understand, for a brief moment, less than a blink of an eye, a few neurons in your Fusiform Gyrus or Wernicke's area will misfire and trigger the exciting question: is this jeuje? Are we zhoozhing here? Am I getting excited?

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