[Ads-l] Facebookery: _huzzies_ "hussies"

[Laurence Horn]

> On Dec 22, 2018, at 6:12 PM, James A. Landau <JJJRLandau at NETSCAPE.COM> wrote:
> 
> On Fri, 21 Dec 2018 13:06:50 Zone-0500 the ubiquitous Wilson Gray <hwgray at GMAIL.COM> wrote:
> 
>> I've never seen this word spelled with _zz_, before. But the only person
>> that I've known - he died ca. 1963 - who had _hussy_ in his active
>> vocabulary always pronounced it with /z/.
> 
> "Hussy" is the term for the girlfriend of a type of cavalryman known as a "Hussar".  The word "Hussar" comes from the name of the Turkish people the Khazars, so the spelling "huzzy" is etymologically correct, albeit archaic.  However, the Khazars famously converted to Judaism, which means that a woman can only be a "huzzy" if she is Jewish.
> 

Well, since in the real world “hussy” is a reduction of “housewife” via intermediaries like huzziff, huzzaf, huzzif, all OED-attested spellings from regional UK dialects, and since “housewife” itself (again per the OED) has pronunciations like /ˈhʌzɪf/ (Brit.) and /ˈhəzəf/ (U.S.), the “huzzy”/“huzzie” version seems to come by its voicing naturally. Indeed, the head entry in the OED is for "hussy | huzzy, n."

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