[Ads-l] Another nouning: "cozy", in the mystery subgenre sense

[Stanton McCandlish]

This won't be news to readers of mystery novels, but a *cozy*, sometimes
spelled *cosy*, is a mystery story in which explicit depictions violence,
sex, and other "hard-boiled fiction" themes are kept out of the narrative
and left in the background to the reader/viewer's imagination.

This is not directly descended (as far as I can tell) from either of at
least two noun uses of *cozy/cosy* that I'm aware of: 'a nook', as in "I'm
sitting in my kitchen's breakfast cozy"), and 'an insulating cover' ("You
need to wash that stained tea cosy"), with the latter more often taking the
*s* (probably because *cosy* in that sense is primarily a British usage,
American writer-cartoonist Edward Gorey's *The Haunted Tea-Cosy*
notwithstanding, and the preferred British spelling is *cosy*).

In the fiction case, it's a shortening of *cozy mystery*, *cozy fiction*, *cozy
novel*, where *cozy* is serving the expected adjective role.

They all surely derive ultimately from the same adjective for 'comfortable;
warm; intimate, close-quartered'.

Examples of the mystery-fiction nouning show up sometimes in the actual
titles of the works, e.g. *Playing with Poison: A Humorous and Romantic
Cozy*. But more often it is still adjectival, e.g. *Bunburry: A Cosy
Mystery Series, Vol. 13 - Lost and Found*. So, I suspect the nouning is
recent, and an outgrowth of shorthand expressions on mystery webboards.

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