Ascent of the A-Word

by Geoffrey Nunberg

  Nowadays, in fact, the objection to vulgarity is often made on purely stylistic grounds. The problem with dirty words like asshole isn’t so much that they’re dirty, critics say, as that they’re a sign of mental laziness or a defective vocabulary. That’s what’s implied when we speak of someone “resorting to” vulgarity, as if it were the recourse of those who can’t be bothered to come up with a more apt and expressive term. Melissa Caldwell, the director of research for the Parents Television Council watchdog group, says that profanity doesn’t just lead to violent acts but impoverishes the English language. In Cuss Control: The Complete Book on How to Curb Your Cursing, James V. O’Connor condemns asshole as vague and urges readers to eschew it for more amusing or unexpected terms, such as cad, cur, heel, or rogue—or better still, to come up with a “clever and imaginative put-down” that will “help you blow off steam while adding luster to your reputation as an astute wit.” And while the Yale legal scholar Stephen Carter doesn’t explicitly mention asshole in his 1998 book Civility: Manners, Morals, and the Etiquette of Democracy, the word clearly wasn’t far from his mind when he deplored the substitution of vulgar epithets for the eloquent contumely of the past:The nineteenth and early twentieth centuries offered a tradition of public insults that were witty, pointed, occasionally cruel, but not obscene or particularly offensive. Nowadays the tradition of barbed wit has given way to a witless barbarism . . . we prefer, animal-like, to make the first sound that comes to mind.

  Those passages sum up the prevailing wisdom about vulgar words in general and asshole in particular: they’re rude, abusive, lazy, vague, artless, and impulsive—not really words at all but animal noises, the first sounds that come to mind.

  The Necessary Delusions of Vulgarity

  None of that is even remotely true, but if we didn’t believe it the words couldn’t accomplish their useful work. The basic point of swearing, after all, is to demonstrate that your emotions have gotten the better of you. As Erving Goffman put it, swearing is “a form of behavior whose very meaning is that it is something blurted out, something that has escaped control.” In that way swear words are similar to words such as ouch!, ick!, and whee! that linguists call expressives. They don’t describe sensations but manifest them: crying “ouch!” is not the same thing as saying “I am in pain at this moment.” It seems natural to think of vulgar words in the same way—they serve to vent or to abuse, rather than to describe. Once a word becomes an insult, Robert Musil wrote, it no longer stands for what it signifies, “but for a mixture of ideas, feelings, and intentions which it can not even remotely express, but which it can signal.”

  But these are, as I say, just useful misconceptions. For one thing, vulgarities aren’t the impulsive ejaculations that people make them out to be. Swearing isn’t like sneezing: we aren’t powerless to control our tongues, however strong the emotions of the moment. As Goffman remarked, “A man who utters fuck when he stumbles in a foundry is quite likely to avoid that particular expletive should he trip in a day nursery.” Indeed, an inability to exert such self-control is regarded as a symptom of a neurological disorder.

  Nor are the words meaningless or even especially vague. It’s a common preconception that slang words are vaguer but more vivid than formal vocabulary—that they denote less, and connote more, than other words do. As it happens, the highfalutin’ word is often vaguer than its colloquial cousin: most people are a lot clearer on raunchy than on prurient. But when a slang word is vulgar in the bargain, there’s a strong temptation to assume that its function as an insult pretty much exhausts its meaning. It’s an assumption shared even by lexicographers, who of all people ought to be attentive to nuances of meaning. The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) defines asshole simply as “someone foolish or contemptible; an uncompromising term of abuse.” That’s roughly the same as the definitions the dictionary gives for shit (“a contemptuous epithet applied to a person”), prick (“a vulgar term of abuse for a man”), fuckwad (“a foolish or contemptible person; also as a term of abuse”), and cocksucker (“used as a generalized term of abuse”). A foreigner who consulted the OED for elucidation of the fine points of English malediction could be excused for concluding that the words are freely interchangeable.

  Now there are some words that seem to function almost entirely as empty terms of abuse. When you call someone a motherfucker, about the only thing you convey is that you don’t much care for him. The word is mostly used either as a direct insult, as in “You motherfucker!” or as a kind of pronoun of contempt, as in “Clancy was supposed to get the tickets, but I haven’t heard from the motherfucker.” But asshole has a quite specific meaning that distinguishes it from shit, prick, and the others. When we call somebody an asshole, it’s because we’ve decided that that’s the shoe that fits him best. You wouldn’t say that the meaning of the word is precise, but then the words that express social evaluations almost never are. When you come down to it, asshole is no vaguer than boor or scoundrel, or for that matter than the notoriously elusive word gentleman.

  Yet there’s a fair consensus about what kinds of behavior qualify someone for the asshole label, and they’re only a fraction of the things you could do to make yourself “foolish or contemptible,” as the OED defines the word. You can be an asshole for abruptly cutting into a line of cars waiting in the left-turn lane, but probably not for failing to signal a turn or texting while you drive. You can be an asshole for cheating on your wife or girlfriend, but not for cheating on your expense reports or a final exam. You can be an asshole for taking credit for a colleague’s work, but probably not for plagiarizing from someone else’s book. A CEO may count as an asshole if he yells at his assistants or makes sexual advances to women employees, but not if he simply gets his board to pay him a bloated compensation package. And even if you believe that George W Bush lied about WMDs in Iraq, that by itself wouldn’t make him an asshole, though he might have earned the label for his press-conference smirks. Of course you can cook up scenarios in which any one of these things might qualify someone an asshole, but it takes some additional background. If I simply say that I caught a student cheating on his final, you wouldn’t be likely to remark, “What an asshole!” unless we both knew that there was more to the story than that.

  No other word carves out the same exact range of misconduct that asshole does. Not all people who are assholes are arrogant, pretentious, or unmannerly, and vice versa. And there’s invariably a loss of precision or color when we forbear from calling someone an asshole in favor of one of the more respectable labels that critics recommend, like boor, lout, or bully. Jerk comes closest. It’s the word usually chosen by people who want to convey the meaning of asshole without actually using the word, like the writer of Cosmopolitan’s online advice column:That guy you went out with is a freakin’ jerk, and you’re much better off without him. It’s one thing to expect sex; it’s quite another to act like an irate ass when you don’t get it.

  “Freakin’ jerk” here is clearly just a sanitized version of fucking asshole. And lest there be any doubt about the point, the writer adds a reference to ass, an insult which Americans now derive from the word for derrieres rather than for donkeys, and whose metaphorical meaning has shifted from silliness to arrogance due to its semantic and anatomical proximity to asshole. (The shift in literal meaning has made the insult ass sound a lot more vulgar than it once did; students are taken aback when they see Henry James or T. S. Eliot describing someone with the word.)

  But even when it’s used as a proxy for asshole, jerk can’t connote the same brazen effrontery (on the web, asshole is fifty times more likely than jerk to be modified by “screaming” or “flaming”). In fact jerk can sometimes be a term of endearment. “I’m in love with you, you jerk!” Jennifer Love Hewitt tells Scott Wolf in Party of Five, a line that would sound a lot less darling if asshole were used instead. (Or recall Howard Hawks’ 1941 Ball of Fire, when Barbara Stanwyck says about Gary Cooper’s character, “I love him because he doesn’t know
how to kiss, the jerk!” Even if asshole had been around back then, you can be sure that nobody would have used it of any character played by Gary Cooper.) Similarly for the retro or “amusing” substitutes for asshole that O’Connor suggests, which usually strike us as denatured euphemisms for the A-word, even in extraterrestrial settings:HAN SOLO: Come on, admit it. Sometimes you think I’m all right.

  PRINCESS LEIA: Occasionally maybe . . . when you aren’t acting like a scoundrel.

  HAN SOLO: Scoundrel? Scoundrel? I like the sound of that.

  Adult viewers understand that scoundrel here is simply the word you use when you’re translating the dialog from When Harry Met Sally for rebroadcast a long time ago in a galaxy far away. After all, this is an exchange between Carrie Fisher and Harrison Ford, not Olivia de Havilland and Errol Flynn.

  How to Do Things with Bad Words

  Ultimately, what makes asshole distinctive is the way it’s used, the speech-acts it allows us to perform. These begin, obviously, with the meaning of the word, the traits that define the particular offenders it singles out. Ask people to characterize an asshole, and they’ll mention arrogance, pretension, egotism, rudeness, or an overblown sense of entitlement. But those don’t pin the word down by themselves; they’re like a list of symptoms that manifest the underlying disorder. At the heart of assholism is a culpable obtuseness—about one’s own importance, about the needs of others and the way one is perceived by them. Being an asshole always involves a particular form of stupidity (on the web, asshole is six times as likely as prick to be modified by dumb). By purely ethical standards, being an asshole is probably less blameworthy than being a shit or a heel, since the latter have no delusions about how they’re seen or what they’re doing: unlike the asshole, they have an accurate moral compass but choose to disregard it. And indeed the asshole is better suited to play a comic villain than a truly evil character: you think of Malvolio in Twelfth Night, not lago in Othello; of the martinet assistant principal or despotic football coach in a high-school comedy, not Dennis Hopper in Blue Velvet. Yet for most of us, it stings more to be thought of as an asshole than as a heel or a bastard, for the same reason that in the schoolyard, “you’re stupid” cuts more deeply than “you’re mean.” To be a heel or a shit is at least to be recognized and detested—Oderint dum metuant, as Caligula liked to say, “Let them hate so long as they fear.” Whereas asshole cuts the ground out from under us, denying our self-perceptions and our pretensions to worth: it tells us that we don’t even see how inconsequential and contemptible we are.

  That, at least, is the dictionary meaning of asshole (or would be, if lexicographers didn’t have a blind spot about the meanings of obscenities). But an account of the significance of a word doesn’t stop at its denotative meaning: there’s also its force. By that I mean not simply the approval or disapproval it expresses, but its power to evoke emotions that the meaning alone doesn’t explain. Think of derogative words. Promiscuity covers a lot of the same ground that sluttiness does, but it isn’t colored with the same derision. Similarly, saying that asshole imputes arrogance or pretension to someone doesn’t explain the contempt it conveys.

  The metaphor obviously has a lot to do with that. Likening someone to the anus suggests that he is small, foul, noisome, and low, as we conventionally view that anatomical feature. (There can be dissenting views, of course. “The asshole is holy,” Allen Ginsberg famously wrote in “Howl,” but he was trying to make a point.) It seems an appropriate comparison for someone who thinks himself more important or grander than he has a right to, and it’s not surprising that there are variants of the same theme in the vulgar words meaning “turd” or “pubic hair” that roughly translate asshole in other languages. But if the force of the word were just a matter of the vividness of the image it suggests, there are other sorts of metaphors that could have the same effect.The woods are literally full of malignant things that lend themselves to the creation of terms of insult: skunks, rats, swine, weasels, maggots, snakes, toads, worms, and all the other beasties that English-speakers have conscripted for their insults since Chaucer’s time, whose names, unlike asshole, have the advantage of being printable in a family newspaper.

  But unlike worm or maggot, asshole is a dirty word, which is to say that whenever we use it we’re flouting the norms of propriety, even in settings where flouting such norms is routine and swearing is virtually compulsory. You can’t pronounce asshole without evoking the people who disapprove of it—the shades of absent parents, teachers, supervisors, officers, or simply an archetypal prude—and placing yourself, at least symbolically, outside the circle of polite conversation. The vulgarity of asshole makes a big difference: it limits the contexts where the word can be used and magnifies its force, and it can create a special bond with the listener.

  We think of asshole as typically a face-to-face insult—the use that dictionaries are describing when they define the word as a “term of abuse,” and the one I had in mind when I began this chapter by talking about “Mind your manners, asshole.” In that situation, saying “asshole!” can be a way of demonstrating that your emotions have overcome your inhibitions, as Goffman suggested. Or it can be a pointed show of disdain, as if your addressee isn’t worthy of the respect that observance of the norms of polite conversation ordinarily conveys. One way or the other, when you call someone an asshole to his face you’re not simply describing him. You’re making a literal display of anger and contempt, like a rhesus monkey baring his teeth and pounding the ground with his palms. Whether the feelings are genuine or assumed, what matters is your willingness to make the gesture. It’s an act of symbolic violence, and in that sense asshole doesn’t simply arraign someone for his misconduct as jerk or maggot do. It’s also a retribution—or when we turn it on ourselves, a kind of self-flagellation.

  But in actual practice we less often use asshole as a direct insult than to refer to some third party who’s out of earshot. In those cases the word’s vulgarity serves not just to make a display of our indignation but also to create a sense of complicity or solidarity with the listener. Asshole was first converted to a personal description in the barracks slang of World War II, and ever since then it has been a label for an arrogant or overbearing superior—a way of bringing someone down to our level and denying him the respect or deference he seems to feel he deserves. Among co-workers, it joins us in a shared defiance of absent authorities, with a hint of the furtive pleasure we took in schoolyard swearing as potty-mouthed children. Among friends and family, it takes down the pretension or presumption of in-laws, neighbors, and schoolmates.

  Or in a variant of that, we may call somebody an asshole in order to commiserate with the people he has offended or injured. There are times when asshole isn’t simply the mot juste but the mot de rigueur. A friend calls to tell you she has just discovered that her husband has been having an affair with the nanny. You’re not about to respond by saying, “Sacre bleu! How caddish!” or by improvising some novel malediction that invites admiration for your cleverness—this isn’t about you, after all. Common decency requires that you simply say, “What an asshole!” thereby not just condemning the offense and manifesting your contempt for the offender, but also inviting your listener to replace her feelings of hurt and diminution with a restorative anger.

  In one way or another, asshole indicates a failure to show the respect we owe one another in virtue of our common humanity, independent of any disparities in power or status. Asshole levels us, but always downwards: it creates an impression of proletarian solidarity even long after we’ve put schoolyards, barracks, and cubicle farms behind us. That’s one place where the word can get tricky. If it’s the natural response of a subordinate to a superior, it can carry an undertone of arrogance when it’s directed the other way, as a way of closing ranks against an upstart. That businessman who’s indignantly berating the airport gate agent for not giving him an upgrade as we wait to board the plane makes it almost automatic to mutter, “What an asshole!” to the
person standing next to us—always provided that we’re in the line for economy boarding. Coming from someone in the first-class line, there’s a chance that sentence will sound like the smug contempt for a parvenu. To use asshole is usually to evoke the shadow of class, even if it’s only of the variety you can attain for a few thousand mileage points.

  De Haut en Bush

  The specter of class colored the utterance by George W Bush that was caught on mic at an appearance in Naperville, Illinois, during the 2000 presidential campaign. Turning to Dick Cheney, Bush said, “There’s Adam Clymer, major league asshole from the New York Times,” to which Cheney responded, “Oh, yeah, he is. Big time.” The incident provoked a blizzard of commentary, which illustrated most of the varieties of humbug and hypocrisy that vulgarity invariably evokes when it bubbles into public view. To Bush’s critics, the remark discredited his pledge to restore civility to politics. As the Boston Globe’s David Nyhan put it: “So much for the Civility Boyz. The pair that vowed piously to bring civility back into national politics took a Labor Day header into a dry swimming pool.” Dan Rather charged the candidate with using “gutter language,” and Newsweek spoke of the “bar-talk crudeness” that would undermine his image as “a genial, upbeat outsider determined to restore civility to the rude business of politics.” And a Gore spokesman described Bush as “using expletives to describe a New York Times reporter in front of a crowd of families,” which was literally correct but utterly misleading.

  Meanwhile, Bush’s defenders were making the predictable comparisons to Harry Truman and claiming that the incident demonstrated their candidate’s plain-spoken moxie. In the New York Post, Steve Dunleavy said that the remark showed that Bush was still a “knockabout Texas fly-boy,” and urged him not to apologize for it—rather he should look Clymer straight in the eye and tell him he meant every word he said: “Everyone, from workers in factories in Gary, Ind., to farmers in Nebraska, will stand and applaud.” And the columnist Cal Thomas, comparing Bush to the “scripted” Al Gore, urged Bush to “Tell it like it is. . . . if some reporters resemble what a proctologist sees in the office, the public will thank you for pointing that out.”