904: business and busyness May 31, 2017

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'Business' is spelt nothing like it sounds in a manner that is strange even by English standards. It is for that reason that unlike other adjectives ending in Y that take the '-ness' suffix like 'happiness' or 'craziness' for which the terminal Y gets rewritten as an I, 'busyness' keeps its Y from 'busy' as a way to disambiguate itself from 'business'. If to you it feels like 'busyness' should also be written as 'business', know that it was for a very long time. In Old English the word was 'bisignis', or what would today just be 'busy' and '-ness', though the need for the suffix to make it into a noun in this case is rather odd as there was already the Old English noun 'bisig'. The original sense of this 'business' in Old English was 'anxiety' and '(state of being) busy' which was kept in Middle English and Early Modern English, but eventually the senses of being given a task, or having an occupation, as well as every other modern sense, arose, necessitating some differentiation between 'business' and 'busyness'.

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