The Bewitching Magic of the "Ass" Intensifier
An ode to the anal emphatic.
As the daffodils begin to wriggle their yellowed mops up through the pullulating soil, and the cock robin whistles the horniest jingle he can summon beneath the twiggen balcony of his hen — as spring itself begins, whole-ass, to sproing, the thoughts of a young(ish) man turn, inevitably, to the suffixal bound morpheme known affectionately as the “Ass” intensifier. And what an intensifier it is! As Daniel Siddiqi notes in his seminal-ass paper, “The English Intensifier Ass,”:
“Ass seems to have a requirement that it appear right of the adjective that it is modifying AND left of the head the adjective modifies.”
Which is to say that unlike its boring-ass friend, “very,” which primly insists on fussing around behind whatever adjective it’s supposed to be intensifying, “ass” slips in like an assassin (sorry) and intensifies the unsuspecting adjective after the fact but before the noun has a chance to reach the crime scene and survey the damage. Returning to the vernal clownery where we started by way of an example, one could say (depending on the politeness of the company), “That’s one horny-ass cock robin!” but never, “That cock robin is horny-ass.”1
In “Serious-Ass Morphology: The Anal Emphatic in English,” Diana Elgersma theorizes that “ass” got into the intensifying game after a brief but profitable stint as a nominalizing morpheme, taking adjectives like “bad” and “hard,” and verbs like “kiss” and “whup,” and turning them into nouns like “badass,” “hard-ass,” “kiss-ass,” and “whup-ass,” as in the short, morally instructive fable, “The badass and the hard-ass opened up a can of whup-ass on the kiss-ass.”
Interestingly, the ass-words formed out of verbs (whup-ass and kiss-ass) are cutthroat compounds, extremely rare combinations where the verb precedes the noun that is its object, as is the case with “cutthroat” or “pickpocket” (normally we do this the other way around in English, saying “backstabber” and “timewaster,” instead of “stabback” and “wastetime.”)
The nouns, however, are a form of metonymy — taking an attribute of something to signify the whole of the thing — so that “ass” in this case is just a stand-in for a person, which is why most of us intuitively understand that a badass has some bad legs, torso, and attitude to go along with that incorrigible posterior. This same metonymy gives us another glorious “ass” construction in the form of a pronoun: “His ass” or “Her ass” can be surprisingly versatile2 pronouns as seen in statements like, “His ass better have my money” or “I told her ass to hurry up.”3
But how did we get here? One theory about the origin of the “ass” intensifier infix is that it began life in the colorful world of military slang. The earliest written example of the term “big-assed” comes from a 1944 passage in H.L. Mencken’s diaries:
“The marines’ chosen name for their female aides is bams, from big-assed marines.”
These are, of course, very literal asses that are being referenced, but as time went on, the connection to actual bottoms began to dissipate. By 1945, planes with big tail sections were being called “big-ass birds,” “raggedy-ass” was beginning to shed its direct association with tattered pants (the rather wonderful Raggedy Ass Brigade is attested as early as 1930), and the ass intensifier grew up and left the ample thighs it once called home to seek its fortune.
From that moment on, the anal emphatic spread its big, beautiful-ass wings, and flew, free from the stifling obligation to point (semantically) at derrieres like a naughty schoolboy and emboldened by a noble mission to populate our greening world with punk-asses, smart-asses, and candy-asses like so many magnificent spring blooms.
As Siddiqi has pointed out, a possible exception here is “badass,” in that one could reasonably say “That horny cock robin is badass,” but I think what’s happening here is that an adjective has formed based on the now quite common noun “badass,” and it’s following the normal rules of garden-variety adjectives rather than the idiosyncratic rules of other -ass-intensified adjectives.
In her very useful survey of the existing “ass” scholarship, Chi Luu points out that “his/her/your/my ass” is actually a “universal pronoun,” meaning that it can be a subject (“her ass is grass”), an object (“we’ve nailed her ass”) or a reflexive (“she needs to get her ass out of bed”), doing the work that would require three separate forms out of a normal pronoun (respectively, “she,” “her,” and “herself.”) For a really comprehensive overview of this topic, see “A Universal Pronoun in English?” by John Beavers and Andrew Koontz-Garboden, a paper that’s chock-full of deeply amusing sentences like “In this section we explore the distribution of your ass compared to other English pronominals.”
One of the earliest examples of the pronominal “ass” comes from a rather unlikely source: A letter from T.S. Eliot to Conrad Aiken. After a bitter complaint about his finances, his wife’s health, and the hardship of war, Eliot dramatically changes the tone with one of his (notorious, bawdy, and often quite racist and misogynistic) King Bolo poems, the relevant passage of which is: “Her taste was kalm and klassic/ And as for anything obscene/ She said it made her ass sick.”
I applaud this choice of topic. Check back to Fawlty Towers from 1979 where an irate guest threatens to “bust his ass” and Basil replies: “What is it with you Americans? It’s all about ’bottoms’ with you!” And of course OJ Simpson disparaging some footwear with: “I wouldn’t wear those ugly ass shoes”
However, I see this clearly as about posteriors, gluteous maximus, a set of muscles, rather than anal, an orifice. That has had its share of analysis, most notably an entire book, from the late linguist Jeffrey Nunberg: http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/08/17/ascent-of-the-a-word-the-beauty-of-the-indispensable-vulgarity.html
Basil Fawlty makes a good point...and why doesn't the same thing happen with "arse" (its begetter) as "ass"?