Ascent of the A-Word Read online

  This was all pure sham, on both sides. “Bar-talk crudeness,” “gutter language”—was the A-word really alien to the inner sanctums of CBS or Newsweek? (Shocked, shocked, to find that swearing is going on!) The fact is that there was nothing uncivil about the remark. After all, Bush hadn’t called Clymer an asshole to his face, much less in a public forum, so he had no need to apologize, beyond saying he regretted other people had heard it. On the other hand, Bush’s private aside to Cheney wasn’t anything like the hell’s and damn’s with which Truman peppered his speeches; if you were looking for a historical parallel, the remark was less Trumanesque than Nixonian. And merely using the word asshole hardly establishes that you’re a true man of the people, or for that matter, a true man. It’s doubtful whether those Nebraska farmers or Indiana factory workers would have taken it as evidence that Bush was One of Us—for one thing, they don’t modify asshole with major league or big-time, expressions you associate with superannuated Yalies, not steelworkers.

  In fact both critics and defenders were appealing to the same proletarian caricature associated with vulgar language. That’s another of the delusions that are essential to enabling these words to do their work; we still speak of someone swearing like a truck driver or longshoreman even though the words have been thoroughly integrated into middle-class English for several generations. According to the situation, the proles in question can be regarded as gutter lowlifes or honest, plain-spoken yeomen, but there’s no partisan cast to that choice. When a Democrat is caught out using a blue word, other Democrats generally give him a pass. “Yes, Mr. Vice President, you’re right,” the White House press secretary Robert Gibbs tweeted after Joe Biden was caught on mic at the signing of the 2010 health care bill whispering to the president, “This is a big fucking deal.” Republicans, not surprisingly, were dismayed and indignant. “I’m very disappointed that he would use that kind of language,” Bush’s press secretary Andrew Card said when John Kerry said that Bush had fucked up the Iraq war.

  Those reactions are automatic no matter which vulgar word happens to be used. But Bush’s choice of asshole in particular enabled his defenders to applaud him for corroborating what they had been saying about the media’s inflated sense of self-importance, as if being an asshole wasn’t a personal defect of Clymer so much as a déformation professionnelle. As William Powers put the charge in National Journal, “The journalistic establishment is like one big, pretentious snot-nosed French waiter.” And Jonah Goldberg took the occasion to observe that “most people see the press as an arrogant and unaccountable priesthood of kingmakers or, in the common vernacular, @$#&*!s.” It was a perfect example of the assholization of political differences—if the media’s coverage is animated by pretension and arrogance, then you can dismiss it out of hand. In normal circumstances, of course, the right’s media critics wouldn’t have made their point by appealing to the A-word. But since Bush brought it up. . . .

  In truth, there was nothing in the remark to suggest that Bush was offering a general comment on the media. It wasn’t impersonal: he and Cheney obviously felt that Clymer had it in for them and was tilting his reporting accordingly. But even if that was right, the remark was still awkward. A powerful political figure can’t describe his media critics as assholes without sounding like he’s taxing them for being uppity. Unfairly or not, the exchange brought to mind a couple of fraternity jocks maligning the freshman nerd who had turned them in for cheating on an exam. Calling somebody an asshole can sometimes be an assholish thing to do.

  Having a Word for It

  The Bush contretemps demonstrated just how broad a range of attitudes asshole brings into play—about civil behavior, about emotion and expression, about authenticity, about gender, about class and power, and about sex and the body. Historically, the concept of the asshole emerged out of the interaction of those attitudes, and the word asshole was coined to express it. People had to see the world as populated with assholes before they could come up with a name for them. But there’s also a sense in which the word gave form to the concept and made it tangible to the community. If we didn’t have a name for assholes they couldn’t figure as categories in our collective moral life.

  Does our language shape our ideas or do our ideas shape our language? The answer to both questions is yes. The common view is that having a word for something is a precondition for having the concept: if you can’t put a name on it, you can’t really think of it. As Lionel Trilling said, lamenting the disappearance of the use of disinterested to mean having no stake in an outcome, “I fear this is a lost cause. I take it very hard—without the word we can’t have the thing.” In one form or another, that picture recurs in most of the stories we tell about language. It’s embodied in Orwell’s fable of Newspeak, a language whose vocabulary has been pared down to the point where it makes seditious thoughts impossible: “It would have been possible to say ‘Big Brother is ungood: But this statement . . . could not have been sustained by reasoned argument, because the necessary words were not available.” It’s evoked by the linguistic chauvinists who say that immigrants ignorant of English can’t conceptualize the tenets of democracy that are built into our vocabulary—what one writer calls “the inherent capability of the English language to define and exhort the essence and spirit of government by consent of the governed.” And it’s implicit in the observations people are always offering about the lexical deficiencies of this or that language: French doesn’t have a word for “nice,” German doesn’t have a word for “fair play,” Arabic doesn’t have a word for “compromise,” Chinese doesn’t have a word for “privacy,” and so on, always with the implication that those cultures must therefore lack the corresponding idea.

  As it happens, those stories about lexical gaps are usually incorrect or misleading. A language that lacks a single word for “compromise” can accomplish exactly the same purpose with a phrase like “come to terms” or “meet each other halfway” (the concept of bargaining isn’t exactly alien to the cultures of the Middle East, after all). But even when the claims happen to be true, it doesn’t follow that the concept is either unthinkable or inexpressible—if it’s important to people, they’ll find a way to get it across. We don’t have either a word or common phrase that translates the German Schadenfreude, the pleasure one takes in the misfortunes of others. But that doesn’t mean that Red Sox fans have to learn German before they can enjoy watching the Yankees lose the World Series in four straight games. In fact a people can have a concept at its disposal for a very long time before they feel the need to give it a specific name. English didn’t have the word patriotism until the mid—eighteenth century. But to anyone who recalls John of Gaunt’s speech from Richard II (“This throne of kings, this scepter’d isle . . . the other Eden, demi-paradise”), it’s clear not just that the Elizabethans loved their country, but that they understood the idea of loving one’s country.

  Take these observations to their logical conclusion, and you come to an opposing view, which is popular among linguists and philosophers: language doesn’t play much of a role in determining thought and doesn’t impose any limit on the ideas you can formulate. True, there are advantages to having a word for such-and-such a concept, but only because it’s a convenient form of packaging. Coining carbon-neutral saved us the trouble of having to say “relating to the maintenance of a balance between producing and using carbon, especially balancing carbon dioxide emissions by activities such as growing plants to use as fuel or planting trees in urban areas to offset vehicle emissions,” as the Encarta Dictionary pithily defines it. The phrase has certainly made it easier to store the notion mentally and communicate it to others. As this view is explained by Steven Pinker, who’s one of its best-known advocates:If a language provides a label for a complex concept, that could make it easier to think about the concept, because the mind can handle it as a single package when juggling a set of ideas, rather than having to keep each of its components in the air separately.

  But all we can co
nclude from this is that “the stock of words in language reflects the kinds of things its speakers deal with in their lives and hence think about.” Seen that way, the appearance of a new word can only testify either to a heightened interest in an old topic or the introduction of a new one, often as a result of some technological innovation or social trend. That’s how we think of words like app, tweet, metrosexual, locovore, and tiger mom. Those are the material signs of cultural change which journalists like to track and which tend to figure as finalists in the word-of-the-year lists compiled by dictionaries and dialect scholars. But while words like these are often clever, they can only herald the appearance of a new phenomenon, rather than shaping or creating one. We didn’t need the evidence of unfriend to learn that social networking had become a major phenomenon.

  But sometimes we introduce a new word not to name a new concept but to color a familiar one with a particular point of view. The eighteenth-century appearance of patriotism didn’t signify that the British had suddenly discovered the love of country but rather that the claim to love one’s country had become controversial, a part of “the hard currency of party rhetoric,” as the historian Mary G. Dietz put it, which is what led Dr. Johnson to denounce it as “the last refuge of a scoundrel.” The label was needed not to name the phenomenon but to enable people to express a particular attitude about it—though with time, that attitude shifted from scorn to uncritical approval. We didn’t need patriotism, that is, until the love of one’s country became a topic that people took a position on. That’s why we don’t need a word for the love of one’s mother—it’s not a position we’re ever going to be called on to defend.

  Think of this as the Caliban principle: sometimes we give things names so that we can curse them. There have always been young, upwardly mobile professionals. But before the introduction of yuppie they didn’t have a fixed place in the social bestiary: you could assert that such people were superficial and materialist, but you couldn’t refer to them in a way that simply presumed that. In fact yuppie was only one of a number of terms that emerged between the late 1960s and early 1980s to redefine social class in terms of the categories of consumer culture: new words like upscale and trendy and newly redefined ones like lifestyle, preppie, and demographics. The words could only follow on the emergence of the attitudes they conveyed. But they confirmed the attitudes as cultural reference points—the very fact of their wide acceptance meant that you didn’t have to explain or justify the point they made (“Yuppies—need I say more?”).

  It’s those attitudes as much as their referential meanings that can make words “untranslatable,” not just across languages but also from one era to the next. It’s easy to find literary and historical antecedents for modern yuppies; the Victorian age was full of young middle-class people on the make. But we can’t label them with that word except by way of making an arch little joke with the reader. John Bayley once described Trollope as “the yuppie beau ideal,” but the attitude the word itself expresses isn’t one that Trollope himself could have entertained, no more than he could have made sense of Bright Lights, Big City or a Sharper Image catalogue.

  In that way, new words don’t simply reflect changes in ideas and attitudes, they crystallize them. And the more abstract and amorphous the changes are—the less they’re tied to material things, the more they’re concerned purely with values or sensibilities—the harder it is to identify and pin them without reference to the words that embody them. Take cool. Since it first entered the linguistic mainstream in the 1950s, it has managed to survive the retrenchment of one after another of the groups and trends it was associated with (the hipster, the hippie, the surfer, the digerato, and now the hipster redux) as it threw off new idioms and derivatives in each iteration: cool cat, uncool, way cool, coolio. It isn’t easy to say what it means—it’s no doubt uncool to try. But we know it when we see it, and through all its transformations, it seems to be an abiding modern sensibility. And once you grasp the idea of cool, you can examine it as modern cultural phenomenon, as the historian Peter N. Stearns has in American Cool: Constructing a Twentieth-Century Emotional Style. Stearns demonstrates convincingly that the style we call cool began to take form long before the word itself entered the mainstream vocabulary. But would we perceive that line of sensibility if there had never been a word to express it—if cool had never appeared, or if it had vanished around 1960 with the rest of hipster slang, like reet and solid?

  The Assholization of the Moral Life

  “Now and then,” Lionel Trilling wrote at the beginning of Sincerity and Authenticity, “it is possible to observe the moral life in process of revising itself.” Trilling was speaking of the rise of the notion of sincerity in the modern era, when being “true to oneself” was added to the inventory of social virtues. But one could say the same of the cultural upheavals that accompanied the rise of asshole in the sixties and seventies, in what we still think of as a transitional moment a half century later. Things once unthinkable were becoming acceptable and even commendable; things once unexceptionable were becoming objectionable or even obnoxious. Watching the reconstruction of upper-middle-class American life during the early 1960s in the TV show Mad Men, you’re taken back to an age when no one saw anything offensive in telling racist and anti-Semitic jokes or lighting a cigarette at the table while others were still eating, and when value-charged notions like “diversity,” “sexism,” “homophobia,” “green,” and “date rape” would have been almost as difficult to get across as the notion of sincerity would have been in the age of Homer. The past is a foreign country: they smoke at the dinner table.

  The additions to our moral vocabularies don’t always involve creating a new virtue or vice out of whole cloth, the way sincerity did in the seventeenth century or that homophobia or date rape do now. Often it’s a matter of refashioning the ones that are already on the table. When the banker Mr. Merdle in Little Dorrit is revealed to be a swindler who has destituted all those who trusted in him, Dickens describes him as a “mighty scoundrel”:Numbers of men in every profession and trade would be blighted by his insolvency; old people who had been in easy circumstances all their lives would have no place of repentance for their trust in him but the workhouse; legions of women and children would have their whole future desolated by the hand of this mighty scoundrel.

  When Bernard Madoff does exactly the same thing now, he’s reviled as a sociopath or a scumbag. But it isn’t as if Madoff’s crime is considered either more or less heinous than Merdle’s was; it’s just that we have different notions about the source of Madoff’s moral failing and of the trust that he violated. Similarly, the Victorians’ humbug and gammon evolved into bunk and bilge and then into bullshit, but we haven’t vacillated in our basic contempt for pretension and obfuscatory nonsense.

  Asshole is similar. From one point of view, being an asshole isn’t really a newly discovered vice like homophobia or date rape. The characters we’ve been talking about—the passenger irately demanding an upgrade at the gate, the husband who runs off with the au pair—would have been contemptible in earlier ages, whatever label they were given. That’s why it’s so easy to naturalize the asshole, as if assholes had been an eternal and universal plague of human societies from the time when Achilles sat sulking in his tent while the war was going badly for his fellow Greeks. So what if the asshole didn’t actually make his first appearance under that very name until the middle of the twentieth century? There certainly seem to be enough examples of the type in the novels of Trollope, Thackeray, and Austen. Think of the smarmy clergyman Mr. Collins in Pride and Prejudice—what better model could there be for the self-important, name-dropping assholes that modern life is swollen with?. . . most fortunately having it in our power to introduce you to very superior society, and from our connection with Rosings, the frequent means of varying the humble home scene, I think we may flatter ourselves that your Hunsford visit cannot have been entirely irksome.

  And don’t forget Darcy, either, initially
disparaging Elizabeth Bennet’s looks (“not handsome enough to tempt me”) and later, following his declaration of love by asking her to appreciate his misgivings about allying himself with someone of her modest station: Could you expect me to rejoice in the inferiority of your connections? —to congratulate myself on the hope of relations, whose condition in life is so decidedly beneath my own?

  What modern reader can come on that passage without muttering, “Sheesh, what an asshole”?—though to be sure of a different phylum from Mr. Collins, one capable of repenting his haughtiness and turning into Colin Firth.

  But calling Collins or Darcy an asshole isn’t simply a linguistic anachronism, like calling Pemberley a dope crib. Austen and her contemporary readers wouldn’t really have understood the concept of the asshole at all, even under a more anodyne name. They disapproved of Darcy’s conduct, but not because he had reservations about marrying beneath his class; they would have found that “natural and just,” exactly as he did. His real offense lay in his vain self-congratulation for having overcome those scruples and his ungentlemanlike cluelessness in imagining that Elizabeth would find that to his credit. That’s typical of the differences in understanding that are implicit in the labels other periods gave to the characters who strike us now as assholes—popinjay, whelp, chuff, coxcomb, bounder, cad, ass, or heel, to name a few. They come down on the offenses with equal severity, but they characterize them differently, the way new medical diagnoses reclassify familiar conditions according to a new understanding of their etiologies.