Super Bowl “wardrobe malfunction,”
Sutton, Robert
Tea Party
Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism, The (Skocpol and Williams)
Thackeray/era
Thomas, Cal
Today Show, The
Tomasky, Michael
Town and Country
Trilling, Lionel
Triumph of the Therapeutic, The (Rieff)
Trollope, Anthony
Tropic of Cancer (Miller)
Trudeau, Pierre
Truman, Harry
Trump, Donald
Twilight of Common Dreams, The (Gitlin)
Ulysses (Joyce)
Uris, Leon
Van Maanen, John
Vanity Fair (Thackeray)
Victorians
Viereck, Peter
Vilsack, Tom
Vinton, Bobby
Virginian, The (Wister)
Vulgarities
American attitudes towards
anachronisms
class and
delusions (overview)
first use examples
following World War II (to 1950s)
“long seventies” and
military and
modern rise of
secondhand vulgarities
stylistic criticism of
substitutions/” denaturized profanities,”
See also “Asshole”
Vulgarities/women
in 1800s
in 1920S
modern adoption of,
labeling men as “assholes,”
in late 1940s
Wall Street Journal
Washington, Dinah
Washington Post
Washington Times
Wayne, John
What Price Glory (play)
What’s the Matter with Kansas? (Frank)
Wiesel, Elie
Will, George
Williams, Brian
Williams, Vanessa
Wilson, Joe/supporters
Wilson, Lanford
Wire, The (HBO series)
Wister, Owen
Wolfe, Tom
Wooden, John
Woodstock (movie)
Woolsey, John
Words
attitude/point of view in
“authentic” pronunciations
isms
nicknames
new word
See also Languages
Wouk, Herman
Wozniak, Steve
“Yuppie,” (fig.)
Zappa, Frank
Zimmerman, George
Zinn, Howard
Zogby, John
Zuckerberg, Mark
About the Author
Geoffrey Nunberg, a linguist, is a professor at the UC Berkeley School of Information. Since 1987, he has done a language feature on NPR’s “Fresh Air,” and his commentaries have appeared in the New York Times and many other publications. He is the emeritus chair of the Usage Panel of the American Heritage Dictionary and a winner of the Linguistic Society of America’s Language and the Public Interest Award. His previous books include Talking Right and Going Nucular. Nunberg lives in San Francisco.
PUBLICAFFAIRS is a publishing house founded in 1997. It is a tribute to the standards, values, and flair of three persons who have served as mentors to countless reporters, writers, editors, and book people of all kinds, including me.
1. F. STONE, proprietor of 1. F. Stone’s Weekly, combined a commitment to the First Amendment with entrepreneurial zeal and reporting skill and became one of the great independent journalists in American history. At the age of eighty, Izzy published The Trial of Socrates, which was a national bestseller. He wrote the book after he taught himself ancient Greek.
BENJAMIN C. BRADLEE was for nearly thirty years the charismatic editorial leader of The Washington Post. It was Ben who gave the Post the range and courage to pursue such historic issues as Watergate. He supported his reporters with a tenacity that made them fearless, and it is no accident that so many became authors of influential, bestselling books.
ROBERT L. BERNSTEIN, the chief executive of Random House for more than a quarter century, guided one of the nation’s premier publishing houses. Bob was personally responsible for many books of political dissent and argument that challenged tyranny around the globe. He is also the founder and was the longtime chair of Human Rights Watch, one of the most respected human rights organizations in the world.
For fifty years, the banner of Public Affairs Press was carried by its owner Morris B. Schnapper, who published Gandhi, Nasser, Toynbee,Truman, and about 1,500 other authors. In 1983 Schnapper was described by The Washington Post as “a redoubtable gadfly.” His legacy will endure in the books to come.
Peter Osnos, Founder and Editor-at-Large
1 Some people seem to use asshole as an all-purpose word of condemnation. I’ve seen it applied to Hitler and Pol Pot, for example. I think that occludes some significant moral distinctions, to put it mildly, but if you’re of the opinion that those people are best described as assholes, then we’re using the word differently—or maybe we’re just using different words.
2 To my knowledge, the word has been used only once on Fox News, by an AFL-CIO economist who lost it with the host Neil Cavuto when Cavuto asked him if he had gotten his degree at a baking school—which to be sure really was kind of an asshole thing to say.
3 Rush Limbaugh managed to achieve a fusion of the two forms of smut in his remarks in March 2012 about Sandra Fluke, the Georgetown Law student who had testified to a Democratic group for the need for easier access to birth control. Fluke, he said, “essentially says that she must be paid to have sex, what does that make her? It makes her a slut, right? It makes her a prostitute.” But aimed as it was at a civilian, the charge was too personal for many, including a number of Limbaugh’s advertisers, and reeked a little too much of the tavern.
4 Public criticisms of someone’s grammar have almost always involved assholism, long before there was a name for it. The point was taken to absurdity in a contribution by Alexander Nazaryan to the New York Daily News book blog that criticized the sloppy grammar and punctuation in the website of Trayvon Martin’s killer George Zimmerman: “Zimmerman is accused of being a careless vigilante who played fast and loose with the law; why would he want to give credence to that argument by playing fast and loose with the most basic laws of grammar?” But the absurdity is only slightly diminished when someone takes the grammatical slips of Dwight Eisenhower or George W Bush as evidence for his incompetence.
5 After the story appeared, the Times’ standards editor, Al Siegel, sent around a memo saying, “Folks: If we have to refer to it again, let’s call Bush’s word a vulgarity, not an obscenity. It has nothing to do with sex. Nor is it profane, having nothing to do with religion or the deity.” That’s how I’ve generally described it here, too. (The Times has grown more permissive since then: it reported verbatim the remark George Zimmerman made on the 911 tape just before he shot Trayvon Martin in April 2012: “These assholes, they always get away”)
6 The only exception I’ve found occurred in a 1995 “Talk of the Town” piece by Martin Amis about tennis prima donnas, and even there the charge was coy: Amis described players like McEnroe and Agassi as “personalities,” a word he went on to define as “an exact synonym of a seven-letter duosyllable starting with ‘a’ and ending with ‘e’ (& also featuring, in order of appearance, an ‘ss,’ an ‘h,’ an ‘o’ & an ‘1’) .”
7 Some slang dictionaries record earlier uses of the word from the 1930s, but in context those examples turn out to involve the anatomical meaning.
8 The word is an anachronism in a scene in The King’s Speech set in Westminster Abbey in 1936 during the preparation for the coronation of George VI, in which Geoffrey Rush as Lionel Logue makes a delightful pun that would unfortunately have made no sense at the time.
KING GEORGE VI: You can’t sit there, get up.
LIONE
L LOGUE: Why not? It’s a chair.
KING GEORGE VI: No that is not a chair, that is St. Edward’s chair. . . . That chair is the seat on which every king . . .
LIONEL LOGUE: I don’t care how many royal assholes sat in this chair.
9 I say “quasi-adjective” and “quasi-adverb” because these items don’t really behave like ordinary adjectives and adverbs. Fucking in “the fucking car” may seem to be parallel to red or old, but we can’t say “How fucking was the car?” or “The car looked fucking.” And while you can say “That dessert was fucking good,” if someone asks “How good was the dessert?” you can’t just say “Fucking,” though you could answer “Very.”
10 When HBO premiered its series Deadwood, set in a South Dakota mining camp in the 1870s, critics noted that its language was extreme even by the standards of pay cable. In every scene, characters were saying “what the fuck,” “who gives a fuck,” “who’s that ugly fuck,” and “shit out of luck.” Actually, none of those words would have been used at the time. Even the roughest of the roughnecks back then would have gone no further than goddamn or son of a bitch—though the latter could still be inflected with its literal meaning, as indicated by the famous line from Owen Wister’s 1902 Western novel The Virginian: “When you call me that, smile.”
11 Before the 1920s a dirty word was simply one that was disreputable or disparaging; in the OED’s first cited example for the phrase, from 1842, a Catholic cook says, “Don’t say popery, it’s a dirty word! Say Roman Catholic when you speak of the faith.”
12 Wouk could play his reticence about setting down the sailors’ billingsgate to comic advantage: “Bellison uncorked a flood of horrible profanity, which, translated, meant ‘This is extremely unusual.’”
13 The word taboo had been in the language since the time of Captain Cook, but it was chiefly associated with the superstitions of Polynesians and other primitive societies. The modernists were the first to use it to suggest the primitive irrationality of Victorian interdictions on speaking frankly about sex.
14 It’s true children often learn the figurative or epithetical uses of these words before learning their unsavory literal meanings, if ever they do—think of douchebag—but here I think they simply assume there must be some salacious meaning to the word. By and large, it’s rare to find vulgar epithets derived from words that have inoffensive literal meanings or no literal meaning at all (as in “Splack! What a sycamore waste of time!”). It sometimes happens, though, that a word retains its vulgarity after the connection to the literal meaning is lost, as most notably with bloody.
15 It’s a telling sign of how standards have evolved that Martin managed to repeat shit and fuck half a dozen times in the course of five short paragraphs condemning the court’s decision—not something you could imagine coming from an FCC chairman from some earlier era. Traditionalist or no, Martin is clearly not a man who has much use for old-fashioned demurrals like “decency forbids me.”
16 In 2007, when a conservative blog posted a study—as it happens, statistically meaningless—that purported to show that George Carlin’s infamous “seven dirty words” appeared more often in the top liberal blogs than the top conservative ones, the syndicated conservative columnist Mona Charen took the result as confirming that the left is responsible for an “explosion of vulgarity, cruelty, and viciousness” on the web.
17 One telling sign of how the meaning of civility had changed is that even as the word was being more and more widely used after the 1960s, there was a precipitous drop off in the use of the plural civilities, which was still associated with the older sense of formulaic and insincere politeness.
18 Cf. Frank Zappa’s “Dickie’s Such an Asshole,” 1974:
The man in the white house—oooh!
He’s got a conscience black as sin!
There’s just one thing I wanna know—
How’d that asshole ever manage to get in?
19 The increasing frequency in print of both the anatomical and figurative uses of asshole over the second half of the twentieth century reflected in part the increasing willingness of publishers to print the word. But after 1970, the figurative use of the word increased far more rapidly than the anatomical use did, which indicates that this use of the word was independently becoming more popular. For more on this, see the note on the figures at the end of the book.
20 “Okie from Muskogee” was covered by performers ranging from George Jones to Devo to the Grateful Dead. There were several parodies, including one by the cult country singer Nick “Chinga” Chavin called “Asshole from El Paso”: “We don’t wipe our asses on Old Glory, / God and Lone Star beer are things we trust. / We keep our women virgins till they’re married. / So hosin’ sheep is good enough for us”—a reminder that asshole could be turned against the hypocrisy of cultural conservatives.
21 Not to be confused with another “Asshole Song” written in 1993 by Denis Leary, who is also known for an abrasive working-class style:I’m your average white suburbanite slob . . .
But sometimes . . .
I gotta go out and have fun at someone else’s expense
I drive really slow in the ultra fast lane
While people behind me are going insane
I’m an asshole (he’s an asshole, such an asshole)
22 Another story has it that Wayne was considered for the Dirty Harry role but was passed over. In John Wayne: The Man Behind the Myth, Michael Munn reports that Dirty Harry’s director, Don Siegel, said, “Wayne couldn’t have played Harry. He was too old. And he would have objected to many of the things that Clint would do.” A few years later Wayne starred in the unsuccessful Dirty Harry imitation McQ.
23 This and the graphs following were derived from counts of the words’ relative frequency from year to year in the Google Books collection. For more on this, see the note on the figures at the end of the book.
24 There are forty-three different songs at iTunes with the title “I Know Who I Am,” variously classified as rock, hip-hop, jazz, Christian and gospel, alternative, R&B/soul, dance, and country.
25 Dropping your g’s is authentic but pronouncing them isn’t, even if you were born to it. The only authentic accents are the ones we speak of people “lapsing into.”
26 Asshole plays a less prominent role in vernacular Black English than in Standard English. The linguist Arthur Spears doesn’t discuss the word in his work on the use of obscenity in Black English, though he devotes a lot of space to other words involving ass. But he tells me that the role of asshole is often filled by fool.
27 In recent years, Allen’s mastery of this maneuver has been rivaled by the postmodern anti-assholism of Larry David in Curb Your Enthusiasm. David never misses an opportunity to remonstrate indignantly with the assholes who plague daily life, like the “pig parker” who takes up two spaces or the “chat-and-cut” who strikes up a conversation with someone in line in order to slip in ahead of others.
28 In fact women were evidently using asshole proportionately more than men were. A 1978 study of Massachusetts college students by Timothy Jay suggested that asshole made up a larger proportion of the taboo words used by women than of those used by men, whereas men were more likely to use cocksucker, prick, and, not surprisingly, pussy.
29 But there’s clearly a homoerotic undertone to asshole buddy, which emerged in World War II army slang about the same time that asshole did, though the phrase carried no explicit imputation of homosexuality. Its earliest definition, which appeared just after the war in American Speech, was simply “a comrade in arms.”
30 Heel is still used for the villains in pro wrestling, as opposed to the heroes, who are called “faces.”
31 Bitch focuses on a woman as a social being, whereas the much more unspeakable cunt addresses her as a physical or sexual object. That’s why bitch is more likely to be modified by words like greedy, nasty, stuck-up, spiteful, vicious, and deceitful, which imply intentional social actions.
32 It’s true the
re’s a long history of calling men bitches. Lighter describes this use of the word as “now rare except in homosexual use,” but it was always a feature of Black English—it shows up in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man—and has become more common in Standard English to describe straight men. Even so, my sense is that this use of the word very often retains some gendered associations (“Top ten signs he’s a bitch. Orders a strawberry daiquiri on the first date”).
33 After Madoff was exposed, Elie Wiesel, whose Foundation for Humanity had lost a huge amount of money in the scam, said that psychopath was “too nice a word” for Madoff: “Sociopath, psychopath, it means there is a sickness, a pathology. This man knew what he was doing. I would simply call him thief, scoundrel, criminal.” But Wiesel was expressing a somewhat Old World view: in modern American discourse; there’s nothing “nice” about calling someone a sociopath.
34 In a 2002 Public Agenda poll, 73 percent of the respondents agreed that “Americans used to treat each other with more respect and courtesy,” while only 21 percent said “this is just nostalgia.” In a 2010 poll by KRC Research, 80 percent said the level of civility had gotten worse, and only 9 percent thought it had gotten better.
35 In a 2002 Public Agenda survey, 84 percent of respondents agreed that “too many parents are failing to teach respect to their kids.” But in a more recent survey by a division of Interpublic, only 13 percent of respondents saw incivility as a problem among friends and family, and just 7 percent said it was a problem at the family dinner table. By contrast, politics was judged uncivil by 80 percent, closely followed by areas that include “pop culture,” the media, and professional sports.
Ascent of the A-Word Page 22
