Tszuji® the Word

tszuj
/zhoosh/ exquisitory verb - taking something and tweaking it, fluffing it, nudging or finessing it to be a little more fabulous and fun. You can tszuj your hair. You can tszuj your wardrobe. in fact just reading on could help you tszuj your whole life!

Tszuji
/zhooshi/ exquisitory adjective - Faaaa-buloussss or Just darrrling..... as in 'OMG you're looking so Tszuji® today Daaahhhling!!'

tszujasm
/zhooshasm/ exquisitory noun - Tingly sensation shoppers get when they find something really, really good at Tszuji®.

exquisitory

Any word used to express fashionable desirability. My five-year-old daughter used this one mistakenly when describing expository writing, but we both decided exquisitory was too good to pass up. It was fairly easy to find the definition. Exquisitory = fashionable desirability.

This comes from the Queer Eye for the Straight Guy book:

'Q. Mommy, what's a tszuj?

A. You know how to pronounce it. Spelling variations include jeuge (France), czuzh (Russia), jooj (Scandinavia), zhuzh (Australia) , zhooj (English), ʒʊʒ (IPA) and Ted's favourite, Zhuzhenstraightenguyen (German, while sipping a glass of crisp Gewurztraminer)- there's a million ways to spell it, and a bazillion ways to do it - we offer you just a few.

tsuzj the word in action....

'tszuj me bebbeh.....!'

Adding or doing something to an outfit to give it a little something extra? Well, that’s Tszuji®ng. He tszujes. It’s all very tszuji and most definitely all about the tszuj.

The first person I ever heard use the term "tszuj" was Nigella Lawson. Tszuji® (tszuj) - the pronounciation.

Let's try and make a little sense of this exquisitely, Tszuji® word - it's all about knowing your affricates from your voiced postalveolar fricatives Note: when pronounced, the beginning and ending sounds (phonemes) are the same, the 'zh' sound of the z in 'azure'. The spelling I gave is the preferred spelling, though the pronunciation guide spelling is also acceptable.

The origin of the word is from Polari, which is a slang mixture of several languages, including Italian, Yiddish, Cant and Cockney.

"Zhoosh" has entered English more recently, especially through the TV series Queer Eye for the Straight Guy. Its initial consonant, unique in that position in English, has led new users to generate variant spellings such as "zoosh", "soozh", ""tszuj." etc. The word begins and ends with the same phoneme, the "zh" sound as in the word "measure".

"Zhoosh" "zoosh", "soozh", ""tszuj." ᎠᎴ

ᎤᏠᏯᏍᏗ. ᎤᏁᎳᏅᎯ ᎠᎴᏂᏍᎬ ᎠᎴ ᏚᎵᏍᏛ ᎬᏙᏗ ᎤᏠᎢ phoneme, ᎯᎠ "zh" ᎤᏃᏴᎬ ᏥᏄᏍᏗ ᎭᏫᎾᏗᏢ ᎤᏁᎳᏅᎯ "ᎠᏟᎶᏍᏗ".

tsuz, tszuj, tjuzs, zjuj and tjuz zhuzh tjuzs.

But it does seem to have coined or at least popularised a new word, and that’s always interesting, especially considering the orthographical difficulties involved. People have evidently tried to spell it tsuz, tszuj, tjuzs, zjuj and tjuz, most of which just involve throwing random letters around. The Macquarie Dictionary has chosen zhuzh, which is the only sensible spelling. The American Dialect Society has a bob each way with both zhuzh (yay) and tjuzs (what?), but it also voted “metrosexual” to be the word of 2003 and deserves to be thoroughly ignored.

What we’re talking about here is a voiced postalveolar fricative. Two of them, in fact. They’re only occasionally found in English, for example in the middle of measure and vision, but they’re everywhere in French, as in jeune and Jacques. They also turn up in Eastern European languages, like the Russian Ж which is generally transliterated as zh. The International Phonetic Alphabet uses the symbol ʒ, which is also called ezh. It makes sense: z is just the voiced version of s (they’re alveolar fricatives), and ʒ is the voiced version of ʃ, which we’re all quite happy writing as sh as in shut the hell up, John Laws!

ʒ is transcribed in other ways in other languages. For example, in Hungarian it’s zs, in Polish and Czech it’s a z with a diacritic (ż and ž), and in South American versions of Spanish it can be rr or ll. Nowhere in the world, as far as I can see, is it transcribed as tj—that’s an affricate, if it’s anything.

That u in the middle’s a bit ambiguous, but English has never worked out what do with that pesky near-close near-back rounded vowel. There’s put, but there’s also pub; on the other hand there’s book but also boot (these distinctions do depend on local prounciation and fall down in various parts of England). Nobody’s suggested anything else, though, so I don’t know why I raise it.

When you choose to to use this faaaabuloussss adjective, you should know that you’re saying zhuzhi, and not any of these abominations that turn out more like chuzzi or zudgie - if you’re lucky.

Oo is a digraph used in many languages. In English, oo commonly represents two sounds: /uː/ (International Phonetic Alphabet [IPA]) or \ü\ as in “moon” and /ʊ/ (IPA) or \o͝o\ as in “wood” or “foot.”

Historically, both derive from the sound /oː/ (IPA), which is also the digraph’s pronunciation in most other languages. In German, the digraph rarely appears to represent [oː] as in Moor.

See wikipedia

ʊ Near-close near-back rounded vowel - see wikipedia

I close front unrounded vowel see wikipedia

ʒʊʒ iːsee wikipedia

Now that we have cleared up any confusion you might have had, get right out there and start telling the world just how Tszuji® it all really is!!