Vert Means Green.

Jasper and I was chatting on IM and regarding how I’m busy at doing nothing he said:

“I envy your busyness“

The word seemed odd to both of us. And immediately afterwards, he started to wonder whether it’s busyness or simply business. Jasper then decided to look it up on online dictionary and found busyness in the derivatives section of they entry busy.

In everyday English we’re used to adding the suffix -ness to an adjective to convey “the state of being (adjective)”. However, an adjective spelled with a “y” at the end and end with open coda /i:/ we replace the “y” with an “i”. For example, silly or tidy become silliness and tidiness, respectively. All is well, until you factor in how business, coming from busy, is strongly associated with other meanings more common than simply describing the state of being busy.

If you look up busyness, you’re likely going to see something along the line of “the characteristic of being busy” and nothing else. And if you look up business you’ll see plenty of meanings that you’re more familiar with yet missing what busyness solely describes. So what’s the deal here? Both words exist and seem to complement each other.

As a linguistics student, when you’re wondering about a word, you look up etymology dictionaries. :P

Turns out in Old English, business is precisely the product of busy (bisig) plus -ness (-nisse), and it was used to describe “care and anxiety.” This is more in line with “the characteristic of being busy” so far. The “work and occupation” aspect of the word does not come until 1387, and the aspect of “trade and commercial engagement” 1727. I’m guessing these meanings took over and is the main association with the word until present day.

On the other hand, busyness was originated between 1840-50, hence it is a logical interpretation that this word was coined to convey the recessive (or even lost) part of meaning in business much later in literature. Even more proof that this is the case: business used to be pronounced with 3 syllables, and the modern 2-syllable pronunciation was not recorded until the 17th century.

So there you have it. In modern usage, you would use busyness in Jasper’s context of “I envy your busyness.” And since the addition of “-ness” to an adjective is to describe the characteristics of the adjective as a noun, busy + -ness will be busyness, instead of business which illustrates something entirely different nowadays from the former.