I would like to use some noun and express plans about it in the future. Think, getting something.
I see "my bride-to-be" as a good example. It's better than using "wannabe." Can I add such tail to other nouns? I would like to avoid slang. Should I find better ways to express such meaning? Something for professional/business context? As short/concise as possible.
Thank you for all feedback and sorry if it's a duplicate - just hard to search such question.
With nouns the most common usages are with family relations, particularly around parents or weddings. And some formulations like president-to-be are found in journalism where it's useful to be concise in describing the results of elections or other processes. Aside from that there are phrases like yet-to-be and soon-to-be where it modifies adjectives or adverbs. It's almost always used with people rather than inanimate objects. Those are the common uses, so anything else might be a bit odd, and you'd be better using an adjective like future or upcoming e.g. my future boss, my future job, particularly in more formal contexts.
In the Corpus of Contemporary American English, the top ten are: soon-to-be (983 occurrences), bride-to-be (355), husband-to-be, mother-to-be, wife-to-be, moms-to-be, mom-to-be, mothers-to-be, yet-to-be, parents-to-be. Further down we get a few like speaker-to-be (32), president-to-be (19), free-agent-to-be (13), sophomore-to-be (11). Free-agent-to-be is largely used in sports journalism; others like speaker-to-be and president-to-be in political journalism.
You can add the suffix to anything you like, but it might come across as humorous or even derogatory compared to more formal terms, so it would be fine in casual contexts but should probably be avoided e.g. in business English.
