Ness

The phone rang at 6:38 in the morning. No problem: I’d already sent my Connections, Strands, and Alphaguess to the fambly thread, so everyone knew I was up. The call came (with assistance) from a granddaughter who wanted to know what ness means: as in kindness.

So I explained that -ness is a suffix, something that can be added to the end of a word. You can add -ness to an adjective, and it turns the adjective into to a noun: good, goodness; kind, kindness; silly, silliness. No problem with the terms adjective and noun: my granddaughter already knows them from doing Mad Libs.

Adjectives, nouns, -ness: what a kiddo!