Ascent of the A-Word Read online

  But asshole involves two kinds of innovations. The word itself introduced a new category that remapped the territory once marked off by heel, cad, and the others. But asshole doesn’t just identify a type of person that never had a single name before; it also does so, oddly, by means of a vulgar name. I say “oddly” because really there’s no logical reason for why the word we use to refer to these people should have an obscene origin. There’s nothing inherently indecent or obscene in the category itself. When you attach the word asshole to some public figure whom you consider egregiously obnoxious you might be taking him to task for arrogance, thoughtlessness, or conceit, but you’re not implying anything about his sexual predilections or bodily hygiene. Indeed, you’re not making any allegation that you couldn’t repeat on Sunday morning network television, provided you reframed it in more decorous language.

  As a name for a certain type of person, asshole comes by its taint second hand, as what the legal scholar Joel Feinberg calls a “derivative obscenity.” When it’s used literally, an obscene word acquires its stigma from the thing it names. (“A nasty name for a nasty thing,” as Captain Grose’s 1788 Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue says in its entry under c**t, as it rendered the word.) But when the word is used figuratively, the stigma is passed on via a kind of contagious magic, to pick up the term Sir James Fraser used in The Golden Bough. Once a word is polluted, it retains its taboo when it is reassigned a new, aseptic reference, or even when it’s buried inside another word. As primitive or exotic as the principle may sound, it’s familiar to every child—think of the illicit pleasure that a four-year-old takes in pronouncing shamPOO. As grown-ups, of course, we disabuse ourselves of the idea that the syllables of such words really have magical powers, but we still react to them as if they did. That’s why the force of the words can’t be contained in quotation marks and the other devices that we ordinarily use to keep the meaning of a word at arm’s length (semantically, they work as a kind of universal solvent). Yet the words can be decontaminated by the simple expedient of replacing their vowels with asterisks or bleeping a syllable. A magical spell has no power unless you say it just so.

  But while the process of creating secondhand vulgarities has always been available to speakers of English, they rarely made use of it before modern times. There have always been taboo words for body parts, sex, and elimination, of course, and they’ve sometimes been applied to people, usually with a scatological or erotic overtone. In the Renaissance, turd was a term of execration and prick could be a lewd endearment for a young man (the OED exemplifies it with a line from a seventeenth-century text: “Ah, ha! Are we not alone, my prick? Let us go together into my inner bed-chamber”). But it wasn’t until about a century ago that English began to create the profusion of dirty words for clean things that gives our conversation its modern stamp, from bullshit to pissed off to shitty to a clutch of idiomatic phrases beginning with fuck (-around,-off, up,-over,-all). These were new words, as surely as mouse is a new word when it refers to a computer pointing device.

  It’s really vocabularies, rather than individual words, that are the units of lexical change—groups of words that share a common form or origin and that are connected by some common theme. Patriotism was one of a clutch of political isms that entered the language in the eighteenth century, including fanaticism, republicanism, despotism, and ism itself, most of them with a disparaging cast—Metternich said that all isms were abusive. Yuppie came in with a number of shorter-lived items from marketing jargon like buppie, bobo, and DINK (“double income no kids”). Or take the successive waves of French borrowings that English has absorbed in modern times, most of them reflecting Gallic stereotypes—words that suggest cosmopolitan sophistication, like debonair, chic, and à la mode, or that permit us to talk about naughty things with a more urbane tolerance than our Anglo-Saxon attitudes ordinarily countenance, like affair, risque, and ménage à trois.

  Asshole and its vulgar fellows have something in common with those French words. They entered the standard language as borrowings, as well, though they came up from the ranks rather than trickling down from a Francophile elite. And like the French loans for naughty things, they suggest notions that it would be inappropriate to have words for in the language that expresses our acknowledged public values. But the motivations for coining the new vulgarisms are a bit less obvious. There’s no mystery about people’s reasons for importing words from French—delicacy, pretension, or the deference to French preeminence in the domestic arts that gave us decor, lingerie, and chef. But why did twentieth-century English-speakers feel the need to create a new vocabulary derived from obscene words?

  The reflexive answer is to point to the repudiation ofVic-torian taboos about talking about sex and the body, whether one goes on to describe that as a liberation or a coarsening of the culture. And it’s true there’s some connection here. When you loosen the inhibitions about pronouncing the syllable fuck in its literal meaning, you also make it more acceptable to use the word as an expression of exasperation or to combine it with off to form a phrase for loaf or shirk (though in general we tend to be more circumspect about the former—a lot of people who have no qualms about saying, “They’re fucking crazy” would have more compunctions about saying, “They’re fucking”). But as we’ll see, the literal and figurative uses of these words had very different motivations and social origins: D. H. Lawrence and David Mamet aren’t drawing from the same linguistic well. Indeed the literal and figurative uses tend to work at cross-purposes: the disinhibition that encourages the first tends to weaken the second. If there’s still some shock value to calling somebody a fucking prick, it’s because we haven’t wholly abandoned our conviction that there’s still something shameful about sex and the body. And however our attitudes about those things have changed, none of this explains why we should have transformed the obscene names for them into new words that had nothing to do with either.

  The redeployment of these words was only incidentally connected to new attitudes about sex—it had more to do with attitudes about class, emotion, self-expression, and the moral grounding of everyday life. And it’s here that we need to look to find the connection between the vulgarity of these words and their meanings. The connection isn’t obvious, as I said—or at least not as obvious as the reasons for importing chic or demode. There’s a temptation to think of vulgarity as simply an ancillary feature of the words, which is the picture that dictionaries imply with the usage labels they tack on to their entries:asshole (American Heritage): 2. Vulgar Slang A thoroughly contemptible, detestable person.

  bullshit (Merriam- Webster): usually vulgar nonsense; especially: foolish insolent talk

  The idea behind these labels is that the difference between a vulgar word and a respectable one is basically a matter of where and when you can say them, rather than of their meanings, like the difference between the colloquial word guy and the neutral word man. That’s the assumption that Harry G. Frankfurt made in On Bullshit. At one point Frankfurt compares bullshit to humbug, and concludes that while the two aren’t freely interchangeable, that’s mostly a matter of “considerations of gentility”: while bullshit is less polite and more intense than humbug, there’s no important difference between the two. But when bullshit was coined early in the twentieth century, it wasn’t simply because people decided they needed a more emphatic way to say what’s said by humbug. In fact the words are used rather differently: try substituting humbug or a more current term like bunk or hogwash in a sentence like “What a bullshit artist,” “a totally bullshit assignment,” or “Don’t bullshit me!”

  We already saw how the vulgarity of asshole shapes the various speech acts we perform with it—to insult, to disparage, to console. But the word’s vulgarity colors its meaning in even more integral ways, just as the vulgarity of bullshit does. For one thing, we apply it only to people of our own sort. Osama bin Laden may have been “a thoroughly contemptible, detestable person,” as American Heritage puts it, but you probably w
ouldn’t describe him as an asshole even if you knew how badly he treated his subordinates and his wives. There’s an intimacy to asshole and other vulgar words; nobody would contradict you if you said that Stalin was a shit, but that probably isn’t how most of us would put the point. Vulgarity and meaning are inextricably bound or rather, there are ideas that only vulgar words can completely convey. Asshole doesn’t just happen to have no respectable synonym: there couldn’t be such a word.

  chapter three

  The Rise of Talking Dirty

  Language in its primitive form is to be regarded as a mode of action rather than a countersign of thought.

  —Bronisław Malinowski, “The Problem of Meaning in Primitive Languages,” 1923

  Ma’s out, pa’s out, let’s talk rude. Pee, poo, belly, bum, drawers!

  —Michael Flanders and Donald Swann, “p** p** B****, B**, D******”

  The Invention of the Asshole

  The figure of the asshole made his literary debut in 1948 in Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead. That wasn’t the very first published occurrence of asshole as a name for a disagreeable person: the word had appeared in passing in another war novel published three years earlier.7 But Mailer was the first writer to attach the word to a fleshed-out character, in the person of Lieutenant Dove, a self-important naval officer seconded to an army unit on a South Pacific island during World War II. Dove is introduced with a description of Proustian precision:Lieutenant (sg) Dove, USNR. A Cornell man, a Deke, a perfect asshole. He was six feet two and weighed about a hundred and sixty pounds, with straight ash-blond hair cut close, and a clean pleasant vacuous face. . . . [Dove] had been assigned to the division as an interpreter at about the same time Hearn had come in, and with amazing, with startling naivete he had announced to everyone that his rank was equivalent to captain in the Army, and that the responsibilities of a lieutenant sg were greater than those of a major or lieutenant colonel in the Army. He had told the officers this in officers’ mess on Motome and had been loved accordingly.

  By the time asshole appeared in print, it had undoubtedly been circulating in army slang for quite a while. In fact it doesn’t really make sense to ask when this use of asshole was “coined.” It isn’t one of those items like pizzazz or beatnik that a clever columnist or copywriter can drop into the language some Tuesday morning. After all, it doesn’t take a great deal of ingenuity to compare someone you want to disparage to the anus, and it’s fair to assume that people have been do-ing that from time to time for as long as asshole (or in its older form arsehole) has been around.

  Still, it isn’t likely that asshole was a conventional epithet much before the modern period. Even in more straight-laced ages, vulgarities and profanities show up in sources such as diaries, personal letters, pornography, slang dictionaries, and the records of prosecutions for public disorderliness or military insubordination (“Go and f—yourself” made its first print appearance in the proceedings of the Old Bailey in 1901). People have been using arsehole to refer to the anus at least since Chaucer’s time, and there are citations from the 1860s on for the metaphorical use of the word for the most detestable spot in a region, as in “the arse-hole of the universe.” So if asshole had been a routine term of abuse much before World War II, there would most likely be some record of it. Ernest Hemingway didn’t use the word in the manuscript of A Farewell to Arms that he submitted to Scribner’s in 1929, which included shit, fuck, cocksucker, cunt, and balls, none of which made it into the published version. That’s not conclusive, of course, but if asshole had been around then, it’s a fair bet Hemingway would have taken to it (it did show up in Islands in the Stream, written in the early 1950s and set during World War II).

  So it almost certainly wasn’t until the late 1930s or 1940s that asshole acquired the specific implications of self-importance and obtuseness that Mailer imputed to Lieutenant Dove. And even then, this meaning of the term wasn’t well established outside of army slang. In his memoir Doing Battle, Paul Fussell recounts that as a college student waiting to be called up in 1942, he and his roommate invented an imaginary student named Philip Phallus: Philip was a nerd—a chemistry major—who played the violin. . . . Waiting entailed other forms of idleness, like the hours I spent with Ed refining definitions—trying especially to specify the difference between an asshole and a shit, with examples drawn from male students of our acquaintance or our imagination. Philip Phallus was clearly an asshole, dumb, sincere, dull, and harmless.

  At the time, apparently, Fussell thought of asshole as meaning something like the modern dweeb or wuss. It was only a few years later, as a junior officer in the European theater, that he cottoned to what was to become the common sense of the word. Forced to listen to “a vainglorious harangue” by General George S. Patton, he turned to the officer standing next to him and remarked sotto voce, “What an asshole!” by which presumably he didn’t mean that Patton was sincere, dull or harmless.8

  Asshole was a relative latecomer to the list of descriptive words that were derived from obscenities in this period. According to Lighter’s Historical Dictionary of American Slang, the noun fuck for “a despicable person” was first recorded in 1927, and the first unambiguous use of cocksucker as a general term of contempt appears in 1919 in a diary entry by John Dos Passos. And prick first shows up as a word for a vicious person in a 1927 letter of John O’Hara (its use as a term of affection for a man in Elizabethan times was long obsolete by then).

  Those epithets were part of a larger vocabulary of words for various personal failings and social offenses that appeared in the first half of the twentieth century, all formed from a small set of time-honored scatological and sexual terms. Bullshit makes its first recorded appearance as a name for inflated humbug in a 1914 letter from Ezra Pound to James Joyce—T. S. Eliot wrote a poem called “The Triumph of Bullshit” in 1910, but it wasn’t published until a few years later. Chickenshit first appears in the sense “contemptible or worthless” in a Hemingway letter of 1936 and in the sense “niggling or trivial” in a Dos Passos diary reference to “the little chickenshit attitudes of a bright student in a girl’s college.” Fuck around in the sense “play around; to waste time” first shows up in a 1931 letter of Henry Miller, whose Tropic of Cancer also provides the first recorded instance of the verb shit in the sense “attempt to deceive.”

  It isn’t surprising that so many of these new words made their first recorded appearances in the diaries and letters of modernist writers, which are among the few unexpurgated records of the colloquial language of that period that have come down to us. But the expressions weren’t the coinings of the avant-garde. They were working-class inventions that Pound, Eliot, Dos Passos, and the others took up in their capacity as literary bad boys, an embrace of popular vulgarity being a useful way of demonstrating one’s contempt for bourgeois conventionality. (In a 1919 letter, E. E. Cummings described bullshit as “a forte and accurate expression-du-peuple.”)

  The hand of the working class in creating the new vocabulary is more directly evident by the time we get to the spate of new items that appeared around the time of the Second World War, many of which were documented by war novelists who took advantage of the wider linguistic latitude that publishers were permitting them. That’s when we encounter the first recorded uses of pissed off for angry, get on someone’s ass for harass or pester, ballbreaker for a difficult task or exigent taskmaster, fuck up for a misfit or chronic bumbler, fuck with to mean meddle or interfere, and fuck off for shirk or loaf. (The Naked and the Dead also provides the first written appearance of the noun fuck off—or as Mailer’s publisher obliged him to spell it, fug off—as well as the first sighting of the alternative dick off.)

  Many of these expressions were probably floating around in soldiers’ slang for quite a while. But it was the war that gave them their point of entry into the wider American vocabulary, as draftees from a range of backgrounds were proletarianized for the duration and subjected to the unrelenting regime of petty ha
rassment and mindless bureaucratic rigmarole that passed under the heading of chickenshit. In an essay on the pervasiveness of chickenshit in the World War II military, Fussell notes how vulgarity expressed all of the rancor and antipathy stirred up by the military class war:Indispensable both to those administering chickenshit and those receiving it, fucking helped express the resentment of both sides, the one resenting the constant frustration of its authority, the other resenting its constant victimhood. Among the working class fucking had always been a popular intensifier, but in wartime it became precious as a way for millions of conscripts to note, in a licensed way, their bitterness and anger. If you couldn’t oppose the chickenshit in any other way, you could always say, “Fuck it!”

  Of course swearing has been the privileged recourse of the Other Ranks for as long as there have been armies. (“She curses and storms at me like a Trooper,” Samuel Richardson wrote in 1740, the first recorded instance of what became a stock figure of speech.) What was new was both the social diversity of the participants and the vocabulary it made use of.

  As Fussell’s observations remind us, the creation of new meanings for asshole, fuck up, and pissed off and the rest paralleled the conversion of obscene words into new intensifiers and interjections. Fucking made its first appearance as a quasi-adjective in the late nineteenth century in phrases like “my fucking boots” (it was first recorded in Farmer and Henley’s 1890 Dictionary of Slang and Its Analogues, which defined it aseptically as “an expression of extreme contumely”). The word soon acquired a remarkable syntactic versatility. “The world is too fucking with us,” Pound wrote in 1918, using the word as a quasi-adverb, while World War I doughboys turned it into an infix, as in “Armen-fucking-teers” for Armentières.9 And by the early decades of the twentieth century, fuck was replacing the profanities damn and hell in phrases like what the fuck, fuck if I know, and fucking well, not to mention fuck you, which was first recorded in 1909. The transition is reflected in the evolution of a World War I joke about a soldier who is having his first dinner at home after several years at the front and asks his mother, “Goddamn it, Ma, where in hell’s the butter?” In the World War II version, the soldier’s request was revised to “Where’s the fucking butter?”