Ascent of the AWord Assholism, the ..., Geoffrey Nunberg
Ascent of the AWord Assholism, the ..., Geoffrey Nunberg
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Ascent of the A-Word: Assholism, the First Sixty Years

Author: Geoffrey Nunberg

Narrator: Francis J. Spieler, Kate Udall

Unabridged: 7 hr 3 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Tantor Media

Published: 12/20/2012


Synopsis

It first surfaced in the gripes of GIs during World War II and was captured early on by the typewriter of a young Norman Mailer. Within a generation it had become a basic notion of our everyday moral life, replacing older reproaches like lout and heel with a single inclusive category—a staple of country outlaw songs, Neil Simon plays, and Woody Allen movies. Feminists made it their stock rebuke for male insensitivity, the est movement used it for those who didn't "get it," and Dirty Harry applied it evenhandedly to both his officious superiors and the punks he manhandled.

The asshole has become a focus of collective fascination for us, just as the phony was for Holden Caulfield and the cad was for Anthony Trollope. From Donald Trump to Ann Coulter, from Mel Gibson to Anthony Weiner, from the reality TV prima donnas to the internet trolls and flamers, assholism has become the characteristic form of modern incivility, which implicitly expresses our deepest values about class, relationships, authenticity, and fairness. We have conflicting attitudes about the A-word—when a presidential candidate unwittingly uttered it on a live mic in 2000, it confirmed to some that he was a man of the people and to others that he was a boor. But considering how much the word does for us, and to us, it hasn't gotten nearly the attention it deserves—at least until now.


About Geoffrey Nunberg

Geoffrey Nunberg, a linguist, is a professor at the UC Berkeley School of Information. Since 1987, he has done a language feature on NPR's "Fresh Air," and his commentaries have appeared in the New York Times and many other publications. He is the emeritus chair of the usage panel of the American Heritage Dictionary and a winner of the Linguistic Society of America's Language and the Public Interest Award. He is the author of several nonfiction works, including The Years of Talking Dangerously, Going Nucular, and Talking Right. Geoffrey lives in San Francisco.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Nathaniel on April 12, 2014

A disappointing read, overall. The initial premise is murky, and the author tends to get rather lost in the weeds (disappearing, as it were, up his own a-hole for relatively long periods of this relatively short book). I don’t even necessarily disagree with most of it, but the book has a tendency to......more

Goodreads review by Edward on October 21, 2012

An interesting and often entertaining cultural/historical/linguistic exploration of "asshole" as word, concept, and idea.......more

Goodreads review by Jeff on October 12, 2023

You’d have to be a real you-know-what not to like this book at least a little bit. Written by a linguistics professor at Cal-Berkeley, this treatise is actually much more than a punchline. Author Geoffrey Nunberg (a regular guest on NPR’s “Fresh Air” before his death in 2020) explores the historical......more

Goodreads review by Vicki on December 28, 2019

What a painful read.......more

Goodreads review by Blair Hodges on November 06, 2014

*Language warning.* Swear words are defined by a given society's morals and values. But some swear words don't merely flout morals. Even when it is offensive, a swear word like "asshole" can get its power directly from certain morals and values. It seems paradoxical, but "asshole" has a moral or val......more