Bucket o' Fuss

The English language is very important to me, and I am a self-admitted judgmental snob if you abuse it. In college I once stopped seeing a guy who used to "excellerate" too quickly in the car...probably from all of the "expresso" he drank. Irregardless (ugh) of that fact, it was probably better that I nipped that relationship in the butt. (Butt. Really? It's "bud," folks. So while you are busy goosing each other, I am going to go ahead and clip this metaphoric rosebud before it is allowed to bloom.)

Imagine my nerd-like distress then when I heard my mother-in-law lovingly refer to my crying baby as a "fussbudget." Um, what? That sounded more correct than what I would have termed a "fussbucket." Even now, spell check is calling me out as wrong. Nooooooo!

Time to investigate and quickly, because someone is fussy again.

Turns out, fussbudget is the original term. Damn. According to the Jewish World Review, editors of the tenth edition of Merriam-Webter's Collegiate Dictionary, babies have been budgeting their fuss since around 1900. Before "budgets" became ridiculously small amounts of cash left over after paying the bills, they were pouches (15th-century England) or "a stock or supply" (16th-century linguistic update). So in all likelihood, fussbudgets are either pouches of fuss (please refer to picture above) or a nice fat supply of fuss (Id.).

But wait! At the very end of the article they note that the addition of "budget" may have been just because it sounded cute, leading to other terms such as the occasional synonyms fuss-button, fuss-bug and...(insert drumroll here)...FUSS-BUCKET!

Saved by a technicality (!) and further backed up by that omniscient tome of etymological theory, the ever-popular Urban Dictionary:
FUSSBUCKET
NOUN - a bucket of fuss; someone who is so fussy they could fill a bucket with said fussiness. See also fussbucketry: the state of being a fussbucket. Example: "Dude, calm down. Stop being such a whiny fussbucket."


Booyah.

Looks like I don't have to break up with myself today. But I should probably feed Aidan instead of taking fuss photos for the blog. Even though I love him so much, it appears as if I couldn't care less. (Yes, "couldn't." Not "could." That doesn't even make sense.)