I had seen the #zuzai tag on mastodon a few times and had no idea what it was, but discovered a whole site dedicated to the new word. It's pronounced like "zoo's eye." You might say an author uses a zuzai writing process, or a teacher requires a zuzai testing environment. Is it a little pretentious to set up a whole website to justify the weird, new retronym you just came up with in a fit of ennui? Maybe. But I like zuzai, it encapsulates something that currently takes a lot of words to otherwise explain, and I hope it worms its way into the public zeitgeist.

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[–] 4 points 4 days ago*

Enshittification isn’t a new word, it was just found. We’ve had “shit” for a long time, then Cory added “en-“ to become, “-ify” to direct an agent of change, and “-tion” to nominalize. It’s understandable and works within the context of the language, by people who hear it even once. It’s conjugatable, “enshittified,” “disenshittify,” and everyone knows what this means by familiarity of the language.

When I see “zuzai,” I see a Japanese i-adjective that I can’t get a meaning for. It’s just hanging out there and it makes me want to reach for a dictionary, but I’ll never find it, cause I don’t even have the right language to begin with.

EDIT:

Turns out it’s a noun, not even an i-adjective. Jail for slop peddlers though?

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