Truss Me On This

 

English has an endless capacity to keep expanding its already stupendous vocabulary. Sometimes current events or historical developments supply new words, often based on the names of people, such as boycott, diesel, and mesmerize.

English speakers will undoubtedly tap into the misfortune of the UK’s shortest serving prime minister, Liz Truss. Gone after 45 days, the shortest tenure of any British PM, Truss’s name is bound to enter our language.

It may show up as a short measure of time, like a moment or jiffy, as in:

“Are you coming, dear?”

“Yes, I’ll be there in a truss.”

            Or it may take on the character of rare words that have opposite meanings, like cleave (to split or to hold together). Hence truss, defined by Merriam-Webster as “to secure tightly.” But its new additional meaning will be, “truss: to fall apart, collapse.” Example: “His poor planning meant his business trussed within months.”
            Some may turn to distorting the word slightly, giving it the ironic usage of “Hey, just truss me on this.” Similarly, drawing from those team-building exercises you may have had to endure at summer camp, there’s a trust fall. By contrast, an invitation to a truss fall foretells unmitigated failure.

Then there’s Wiktionary’s definition of truss as a verb: “To tie up a bird before cooking it”—surely a fitting (albeit sexist) description of the doomed PM’s fate.

Who knows, just as many of the nursery rhymes we learned as children had historical roots, maybe our great-great-grandchildren’s repertoire will incorporate what we are living through now:

Hickory dickory dock.

Poor Liz ran out the clock.

The clock struck one

And she was gone.

Hickory dickory dock.

And your great-great-granddaughter will ask, “Daddy, who was Liz?” He will reply, “I don’t know. Let’s ask Alexa—it’ll take just a truss.”

[300 words]