It slips into conversation without ceremony. Six-ish, we say, or blue-ish, or done-ish, and with that single syllable, we soften the word. Ish is a quiet rebellion against precision – not as an escape, but as a gesture of truth told in layers. It leaves space. It breathes. It understands the world rarely fits clean lines.
I’ve long been drawn to ish, perhapds before I even noticed it. It was always there, padding around the edges of certaintly like a fox in twilight, saying: not quite, but close. it isn’t a cop-out. It isn’t indecision. It’s something gentler, something liminal. The shimmering place where something mostly fits, but not entirely. A way of honouring what almost is, without forcing it to become what it is not.
Language can be brutal in its binaries. You’re either early or late, masculine or feminine, this religion or that one. The pressure to choose a side is relentless, especially if you live in a world that expects clarity – or claims that clarity equals honesty. But what if your truth is a river, not a stone? What if it changes shape in a different light? What if you need ish becvause it allows you to stay in motion?
This is where ish becomes not just useful, but powerful. Not just a suffix, but a spiritual position, a grammatical threshold, a way of naming the magic that lives in almosts, maybes, and not-yets. Queer folk know this space intimately. Neurodivergent folk, too. We become fluent in it, not always by choice, but through survival. We leanr to say things like: I’m sort of out, I’m kind of ok, I’m not quite ready, I’m this…ish. And each time we say it, we’re drawing a border that’s both protective and porous – a shimmering line that guards complexity without demanding performance.
In that sense, ish becomes a sovereign act. A refusal to be pinned down by language that doesn’t hold us. It gives us the chance to define ourselves not by the expectations of others, but by the fluid nature of our becoming. And becoming is sacred. Becoming is always in process. If I call myself Druidish, it’s not a hedge – it’s an opening. A way of saying: I will walk this path with heart, but I don’t need to wear every leaf of its lineage. It’s an acknowledgement that spiritual life is not a checklist, and that integrity often lives in nuance.
Even the roots of -ish carry this idea. It stems from Old English -isc, meaning “of the nature of” – not lesser than, not vague, but of the essence.1 Something that belongs to a thing without being entirely bound by it. To bee greenish is not to deny the green, but to allow light and shade, seafoam and moss. It is green with room to move.
It shows up in timekeeping, too, that quiet negotiation between precision and personality. We say late-ish when we mean, I’m trying. Or I care, just nit rigidly. Or time is slipper today and I’m doing my best to hold it. There is no shame in that. If anything, there’s honesty in it. A small truth about how we exist in relation to schedules and expectation – fluid, human, and a little off-centre.
I’ve heard people dismiss ish as evasive, or weak. As though clarity is a virtue in all things. But I think there is something deeply courageous about resisting the push to define. To speak softly into a noisy world, and say: this is what I know so far. There’s a steadiness in that. A grace. And sometimes grace looks like pausing at the threshold and refusing to slam the door shut.
In Druidic practice, we’re ofte invited to dwell in the liminal. Between light and dark, root and branch, seen and unseen. We walk those in-betweens not as tourists but as kin. Ish belongs there, it’s part of the same texture. The part that says: this grove isn’t bound by doctrine, this belief isn’t a fence, this ritual isn’t a rule. It’s an invitation to notice, to name, to shift shape when the spirit moves.
And so ish becomes more than a suffix, it becomes a spell. A threshold. A prayer for those of us who are learning to live in the spaces between. Not because we’re indecisive, but because we’re listening closely. Because the world is vast, and we refuse to make it smaller just to fit inside someone else’s label.
I don’t know if I’ll ever be one thing. I suspect I’m not meant to be. But I can be trueish, healedish, wholeish. And for now, that feels like plenty. That feels like poetry in its rawest form: unfinished, unfolding, alive(ish).
The London Druid 