The quarterly update of the Oxford English Dictionary is always an occasion for rejoicing among hardcore lexicography buffs. The latest update is an even bigger bumper crop than usual, with a whopping 1,400 new words, senses, and subentries online. If you skim through the public list, you’ll see that a very large number have to do with the words arse, ass, bum, and butt, including related phrases and compounds. You might even say there’s a metric buttload of such additions. (Buttload, by the way, was already added to the OED back in June 2009, citing examples going back to 1988 — none of the metric variety, unfortunately.)
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slang
Pubic education
English-usage authority Bryan A. Garner shook Language Twitter by suggesting that only philistines pronounced pubes as a single syllable.
More than a few of us responded with tweets of bewilderment and skepticism, likely confusing everyone around us as we muttered “PYOO-beez. PYOOBZ. PYOO-beez??” at our screens. Continue reading
“Trust me, I’m an asshole”
You’ve invented a new kind of bidet for the American market: an inexpensive, easy-to-install attachment that replaces toilet paper with a water stream. You’ve given your invention a cheeky name: Tushy.
Now you need a mascot to give your product a face. Naturally, you choose … an asshole. And you give it a starring role in a nearly three-minute-long advertorial.
“But like literally: Poop comes out of me.”
Sort of a manic pixie dream asshole, actually, with a potty mouth that cheerfully emits English swears and English-inflected Yiddish scatology along with a generous dose of social shaming.
A paradoxical-ass word
Ass shows up a lot on Strong Language. We’ve looked at kick ass and my ass, lick-my-ass and assclowns and asshats, among other-ass things – or other ass-things, if you prefer the xkcd hyphenation. (See Language Log for a lit-ass –ass lit review.)
As a suffix, –ass is used to form ‘generally negative (but increasingly positive too) adjectives and occasionally nouns’, notes Green’s Dictionary of Slang. This Janus nature recurs in slang, as in the contradictory shit vs. the shit. And you can’t spell Janus without anus.
A search for ass on GDoS currently yields 137 results, and the main entry for ass (n.) has 184 subentries, with compounds like ass-bucket (‘unpopular or unimportant person’) and expressions like give up the ass (‘accede to seduction’) and up to one’s ass in alligators (‘in very serious troubles’).
Ass, in short, gets around. It’s a seriously productive-ass piece of vocabulary.
“Jumos”: a slurry-sounding typo dredges up a slangy, sweary past
One of the stranger items to surface so far from Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury—whose sweary account of the Trump White House I recently covered—is the curious case of jumos.
On the 2016 Trump Tower meeting with a group of Russians, Wolff writes that Bannon said: “The chance that Don Jr. did not walk these Jumos up to his father’s office on the 26th floor is zero.”
Putting aside Bannon’s explosive implication that Trump himself met with the Russians, despite White House denials to the contrary, Bannon’s statement had many scratching their heads: What is a jumo? Specifically, it had Maggie Serota wondering in her January 3rd Spin article: “Did Steve Bannon Invent a New Slur?”
