Thinking about ass…

Last night, watching Penn Jillette’s Penn Says got me thinking about ass.

In Half-Ass Thursday, Penn mused on the meaning of the phrase half-ass. The clip must set some kind of record for uttering ass in any single instance without making it gratuitous at all. (Stephen Fry once said fuck some 17 times on live television.)

So, here are some thoughts about ass.

This is off the top of my head…a rigorous semantic analysis would be about as interesting as someone teasing, ”I’m a sex researcher”, and then you learn they dryly analyze MRI cross-sections of coitus.

For starters, I write and say arse, which is the UK English form used by Poms, Aussies, Kiwis and Sith Efrikins. For any Yank readers, we don’t pronounce the ‘r’, and the long initial vowel sound is like the /a/ in the way you guys pronounce Mazda.

Anyway, getting back to ass, and half-ass.

Etymology is pretty irrelevant here. For example, girl once referred to either a young female or male, so word origins don’t always have much relevance to modern usage. So let’s look at ass and half ass in usage…what does it mean, and is it good or bad?

There are hundreds of ass phrases, and the word is highly productive, meaning ass can be used to generate an infinite number of new ass phrases. So don’t bitch at me for not treating every kind of ass. There are regional and social variants of ass, so some ass might be native to Australia (arse-licker is popular amongst Australian politicians). Furthermore, ass changes through time and space.

So, half-assed could have different dialectal meanings based on regional or social factors. Age-based differences are possible, but I’ve heard variants used by people younger and older than me. Gender-based differences are unlikely. Sex-preferential and sex-exclusive forms don’t really exist in the English language.

Is half-assed good or bad? Just because there’s an ass in it, doesn’t mean it’s bad. The epithets fat ass and dumb ass have negative connotations, but the metonymic piece of ass is a compliment (well, it’s specifically synecdoche…but I don’t want to bog your ass down in detail). Paradoxically, bad ass is good, while to kick ass is good for the agent, but to kick someone’s ass is bad for the experiencer. Having your head up your ass (like the gent above) is bad, but having your head up someone else’s ass isn’t always…

In usage that I’ve encountered, half-assed implies apathy. It typically has negative connotations of laziness or indifference. It suggests that something was executed unsuccessfully, and the performance was lacklustre and indifferent. Half connotes that the job was somewhat incomplete, and what was done was done poorly.

We can also tell a word by the company it keeps. Collocations, or fixed phrases, can reveal aspects of meaning via usage. Common terms like half-assed effort, half-assed attempt and half-assed job imply that an act was performed without diligence or motivation.

It’s highly likely that half-assed is polysemous with a ‘half-good’ sense in existence, but, this still seems to suggest some negativity. If it’s only half-good, it’s still half fucked up in some way. It’s like stereotype – some think there are negative and positive stereotypes, but stereotypes all seem to have some sort of underlying negativity in that they are limiting, fixed and don’t account for variance.

Penn mentioned fully-assed, which I’ve heard used to refer to everything from a complete and dedicated effort, through to more literal and corporeal references to ample-sized bottoms.

As for ass overall, any taboo meaning seems to win out over an ‘innocuous’ meaning.

Ass = “bottom” won out over ass = “donkey”.

This is true of most polysemous words with taboo senses. That’s ’cause we’re all pervy.

My Mum’s name is Gaye, which had a ‘happy’ sense in the mid C20th. That’s not to say that gay is ‘bad’, but to say that both gay and ass have pushed out their ‘neutral’ senses.

But…language is a loaded weapon. Nothing seems to be neutral, really. Everything is laden with connotation.

In the end (yep, a bad pun), I’ve barely touched upon ass.

I could cover more ass, but I couldn’t be assed…

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