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

[ADSGarson O'Toole]

Interesting topic, Stanton. Back in 2012 I posted a pertinent message:

Word: cozy, cozies - mystery story or genre
https://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/ads-l/2012-September/122383.html

The old message started with an adjective citation in 1958. The
message also included a 1977 citation containing the phrase "the
Cozies" which apparently was using "cozy" as a noun.

Year: 1977
Book: Murder Ink: The Mystery Reader's Companion
Author: Dilys Winn
Published: Workman Publishing, New York
Chapter 1: The Mystery History
Section: From Poe To the Present
Quote Page 3 and 4
Database: Internet archive; verified with scans

[Begin excerpt]
Of course, the Doyenne of Coziness is Agatha Christie, and the first
book in the canon is The Mysterious Affair at Styles. Coziness,
however, took another ten years to reach full kitsch, which happened
when Miss Marple arrived in The Murder at the Vicarage.

Alternately titled the Antimacassar-and-old-Port School, the Cozies
surfaced in England in the mad Twenties and Thirties, and their work
featured a small village setting, a hero with faintly aristocratic
family connections, a plethora of red herrings and a tendency to
commit homicide with sterling silver letter openers and poisons
imported from Paraguay. Typical Cozy writers include: Elizabeth
Lemarchand, Margaret Yorke, V.C. Clinton-Baddeley . . .
[End excerpt]

Garson

On Fri, May 17, 2024 at 8:49 PM Stanton McCandlish
<smccandlish at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> 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.
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org

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The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org