Sus

In 2020, a simple word escaped from the emergency meetings of a million Discord servers and infected the entire English language. "Sus"—short for suspicious—was Among Us players' shorthand for accusing each other of being the impostor. Within months, it had escaped containment to become the defining slang of a generation stuck indoors with nothing but games and paranoia.

The word spread faster than any impostor could vent. Your coworker acting weird in the Zoom call? Sus. That take on Twitter? Extremely sus. The quiet kid who never unmuted? Emergency meeting. Sus became a Swiss Army knife of social commentary, equally useful for genuine suspicion and ironic overuse.

At its peak, sus was inescapable. Twitch chat spammed it. TikTok sang it. The word infiltrated group chats, comment sections, and eventually your parents' vocabulary. When a word makes it to Facebook, the clock starts ticking.

But that which rises from the Discord must eventually return to the Discord. By 2022, calling something "sus" had become the linguistic equivalent of saying "that's what she said"—a once-sharp joke dulled by infinite repetition. When grandma started calling the grocery store cashier sus, the emergency meeting was called on the meme itself.

The word that once carried life-or-death weight in a pixelated spaceship cafeteria was voted out of relevance, ejected into the void where dead slang goes. Red was the impostor. And so, apparently, was linguistic freshness. Sus was sus.