Between us I know I didn’t invent the word, but it’s certainly responsible for its explosive popularity in recent years, so it shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise to see “her” finally do it ointo the game show Danger.
On tonight’s episode, contestants were given the prompt “Slang adjectiveive for someone you think is not what they seem, especially when they could be the impostor in the game Among Us”.
Mattea summed it up:
Like I said, Between us didn’t invent the word. Its recorded history goes back almost a century, when it was used as “police jargon” in Britain. Saying someone was “sus” was just…a shortening of the word “suspect,” exactly the same meaning used today (and in-game).
Although the word has some troublesome connotations, it has been used in conjunction with a stop-and-search police search laws in the UK which turned out to be hugely racist – it’s been used constantly ever since, along with its ‘to find out something’ sibling, which I still hear living in Australia the whole time
THATOf course, my dad and his buddies’ use of the word wouldn’t explain its wider acceptance by internet culture, otherwise we’d all be saying, “You’ve got Buckley’s chance,” too. or if you fall off something, you’ve “fallen down.” The use of “sus” as popular in the last 20 years comes out instead its adoption by black communities online:
Beca use sus predates the internet, there is no record of its first use on the internet. However, several archived sources state that black internet communities first started using the slang on social media sites and forums.
The Urban Dictionary’s earliest definition was published in August 2003 by a user named Diego, who defined the term simply as “short for ‘suspicious’ or suspicious to describe anything that makes someone raise an eyebrow.
Now this would be the part of the blog where I would ask you to suggest the next “gamer” word to appear on the show, but we’d all be dying of shame write and/or read, so maybe we’ll just pass.
