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Some notes on 'asshat' (2018)

205 points| hashamali | 3 years ago |merriam-webster.com

79 comments

order

JacobAldridge|3 years ago

An aside, but one of my more fun small pranks involved two fortune cookies in the office circa 2007.

I extracted the real fortunes, and inserted two of my own. When a friend dropped by, I handed him one and took the other.

His fortune read "You are an asshat".

Which surprised him somewhat, differing as it did from the usual fare.

What blew him away was when I cracked my cookie and withdrew my fortune: "Your friend is an asshat".

casion|3 years ago

The use of written word in these scenarios is always interesting to me. I have video of me and some friends using the word "asshat" predating their first recorded usage by almost a decade. (I have no idea why I remembered that video when reading this... but here it is on my hard drive)

Ironically in a similar context, a bunch of punk rockers talking about someone in a band we didn't like!

I always wonder how many words have an etymology which predates written use significantly due to the "class" of people who use that word. This certainly seems to be a minor case at least.

jfengel|3 years ago

It's pretty much universal. Etymologists and lexicographers know that most words were in use for some time before being written -- anywhere from years to centuries. They try to make inferences by other means, as best they can.

They gradually expand the corpus they can search. A lot of words that are attributed to Shakespeare are gradually finding earlier sources, often in manuscripts. They knew all along that Shakespeare wasn't the first person to use a word (a common myth), but that his works were widely printed and thus survived.

Those manuscripts still don't include spoken usages, and show only the use by the class of people who could write. But it is solid data, before they go off into more tenuous hypotheses.

dang|3 years ago

Can you post the clip somewhere? That would be interesting, and apparently of historical significance!

JacobAldridge|3 years ago

> I always wonder how many words have an etymology which predates written use significantly due to the "class" of people who use that word

I studied a bit of Shakespeare at university, and my awesome lecturer (https://researchers.uq.edu.au/researcher/619) was always very clear to note that for many phrases "Shakespeare was the first to write it down", which is quite different to "Shakespeare made up this phrase / word".

To your point, he of course was attempting to write for a variety of classes, including the illiterate (his plays weren't written to be published, that only happened after his death - they were ephemera to be performed and witnessed). His success may very well have come from using many phrases that the "lower class" would have recognised from use not just inference.

jameshart|3 years ago

There are certainly academics who collect and study spoken language corpora, not just written - it’s very much a matter of what gets collected and catalogued though. The fact that early citations here are from Usenet speaks to the availability and search ability of that corpus much more than to its role in the origination of written speech. Transcripts of IRC and MUDs and aim chats are not collected and indexed, so they don’t get referenced.

Similarly with spoken corpora it tends to be things like interviews with old people created to preserve dialect recordings, or material from local radio news - rather than random conversations among young people.

I guess by virtue of ‘tape in the studio just kept rolling’ there might be rather more recorded examples of band members chatting away over the years than of other similar aged groups.

emptybits|3 years ago

I have loved this word since I first heard it. I assumed it evolved out of the common expressions: "get your head out of your ass" or "he's got his head up his ass".

To me, this evokes an image of wearing one's ass as a hat. I love the ridiculousness of picturing that.

datavirtue|3 years ago

Yeah, it made its way into my quiver by hanging around slashdot for years.

JKCalhoun|3 years ago

If I had to guess: it is a version of asshole you might be able to say in front of your mother.

samatman|3 years ago

Is the etymology actually obscure? I seem to recall it gaining currency in the warblog era (late but not lamented) and it's a way of saying someone has their head up their ass. They're wearing their ass as a hat.

I remember this being explained a lot in various comment sections where folks would yell at each other about the war. It's hard for me to see this as folk etymology since afaik it's where the word itself comes from. Someone should ask Instapundit.

mordechai9000|3 years ago

I first encountered "asshat" in the context of network security: there are white hats, who are motivated by ethics and social responsibility. There are black hats, who are motivated by personal gain and seem to lack a sense of morality. Then there are asshats, who don't care about anything other than amusing themselves at other people's expense.

I have absolutely no idea of this is the origin of the term, or if it just fit there perfectly.

deaddodo|3 years ago

I can remember "asshat" being used among punks, goths, metalheads, hackers, etc during the 90s; for sure. At least, in Southern California.

pseudalopex|3 years ago

The examples in the article were older and from a different community.

Wistar|3 years ago

My late father-in-law and his buddies used the expression "uglier than a hat full of assholes," and I always assumed that "asshat" came from that. Guess I was wrong.

pohl|3 years ago

Another related word is "assclown" — which, as far as I can tell, was created accidentally when actor David Herman delivered a line of dialoge with emphasis on the wrong syllable while filming Office Space.

He was meant to call Michael Bolton a "no-talent-ass clown", but delivered the line as "no-talent ass-clown".

Or something like that. And now assclown is a thing.

wavefunction|3 years ago

nah Office resonates because it MIRRORED real life en vérité, not the other way around. That's always been Mike Judge's strength, casting the actual as fantastic as it really is for better or often worse.

we were saying assclown or azzclown before the movie but it hit so sweetly thus

PantaloonFlames|3 years ago

I always thought of it as separated by a slash.

Ass/clown.

tlb|3 years ago

> the etymological note we have describes the linking of ass and hat as “seemingly nonsensical”

What? It's obviously a reference to having your head up your ass, thus turning your ass into a hat.

GuB-42|3 years ago

Etymology can be complicated...

As a French, I have another explanation. The french equivalent to a "dunce cap" is "bonnet d'âne". "bonnet" means "cap" and "âne" means "donkey", so "bonnet d'âne" literally translates into "asshat".

It is probably not the true origin of the word, but it is not impossible either. Also, words can have several origins.

hunter2_|3 years ago

A minor issue with that reasoning is that it doesn't explain why you might use the word asshat to refer to a person who is wearing an asshat. Asshatter would make a bit more sense, akin to brownnoser. On the other hand, I guess words like fatass have this same problem of equating the person with something the person possesses.

anentropic|3 years ago

I had always assumed, based on nothing, that "asshat" was originally a type of hacker... neither black-hat nor white-hat, but merely ass-hat

indymike|3 years ago

First time I ever heard it was in the US Navy, Circa 1994-ish. Was possibly the most perfect word to describe a particular junior officer who loved to walk around the barracks grounds and harass in-uniform sailors who failed to salute him. "Oh, look it's Ensign Asshat."

markbnj|3 years ago

It's been a long time, but I seem to recall the term being used to describe a specific animation performed over the head of a fallen enemy when playing MMOs like Asheron's Call or Dark Age of Camelot, which I played a lot of circa 2001 or so.

golem14|3 years ago

The article compares with a 15th century word ass-head, but IMO ass-hat is really meaning arse-head, and ass-head refers to the animal, making an ass-head closer to a stupid person, less a detestable and disagreeable one.

pkamb|3 years ago

I think its usage on the internet grew as an acceptable alternative to the banned word "asshole" on various message boards.

https://ksot.net/banned/

"Asshat" also gives you plausible deniability for sneaking in "ass" + the past tense of "shit". That's how I've always read it.

PrimeDirective|3 years ago

There's a Finnish stand-up comedian who also pondered on the many possibilities of the English word "ass". This is him on Conan's talk show: https://youtu.be/RAGcDi0DRtU

Funny enough, he mentions the same things the article does, especially the end of it.

adrianmonk|3 years ago

> the etymological note we have describes the linking of ass and hat as “seemingly nonsensical”

I always assumed an asshat is a person with their head up their ass, i.e. they are wearing it as a hat.

shagie|3 years ago

I first encountered this term while playing Kingdom of Loathing. https://kol.coldfront.net/thekolwiki/index.php/Asshat which puts it at somewhere in the 2005 or so timeframe when I encountered that term.

skeaker|3 years ago

This is where I first heard it as well. I remember that it stuck out as being novel in terms of crass humor, but according to the article the term predated it by several years at that point. Makes you wonder about what obscure new words are being used right now that you won't hear for another decade.

Tao332|3 years ago

In my memory you had to craft it from two half-asses, but it looks like they were really called bum cheeks.

I remember first encountering the term on b3ta around the same time.

mkr-hn|3 years ago

This is the second Usenet-borne word I've seen enter the dictionary recently. I forget what the other one was, though I remember it had to do with graffiti and was popularized by rather than created on Usenet. I think we're going to see this more and more over the next decade or three as slow-burning words from the early internet stumble into memes and discourse around major events.

flobosg|3 years ago

‘Unfriend’ is another one.

> (…) though I remember it had to do with graffiti and was popularized by rather than created on Usenet

That one’s probably king as a verb (“kinging New York”).

xoxxala|3 years ago

I'm doing my part! I use "plonk" once or twice a day, which is probably more than the average person.

leoc|3 years ago

For my money it probably started as a play on or corruption of ‘brass-hat’, the old unflattering slang word for a senior military officer.

deaddodo|3 years ago

> It occupies the space between assez and asshead.

The fact that asshead, a word I can honestly say I've never heard used in any English dialect, merited inclusion before asshat, a word I've heard a dozen times this last week, boggles my mind.

anamexis|3 years ago

Well, as noted in the article, asshead has a few hundred years on asshat...

zdw|3 years ago

> There is a profound difference between being in possession of a “sweet-ass hat” and a “sweet asshat”

Someone at MW has read: https://xkcd.com/37/

benhoyt|3 years ago

In Kiwi (New Zealand) slang we often add "as" to adjectives, like "sweet as" or "good as" to mean "no problem!" or similar ... without something after the "as" to compare it to (kind of like "good as gold" but without the word "gold"). Anyway, my Kiwi friend (a guy) studied in the U.S. for a while, and once he held open the door for a girl, and she said, "Thanks!" He called after her in chirpy Kiwi slang, "sweet as!" She heard, "Sweet ass!" and was not impressed! After a moment he realized what she'd heard and tried to explain, I'm not sure whether she believed him or not. :-)

function_seven|3 years ago

37? I can't believe it was that long ago. (Didn't even click your link, I know what it is :)

ggm|3 years ago

for some reason, asshole is ruder than asshat. I think the fundamental (hah!) thing here is that ass, and fanny are somehow not rude, but hole is.

rmatt2000|3 years ago

Threads like this are why I come to HN.

livinginfear|3 years ago

My impression was always that the term connoted one who was wearing an ass as a hat, i.e. has their "head up their/an(?) ass". Which as many would already know is an English idiom connoting someone of poor manners.

bitwize|3 years ago

Thought it came from Jeff K. on Something Awful, back when Something Awful was good.

User23|3 years ago

That’s my recollection as well. It spread to the forums, and like so many other terrible things spawned by that site, metastasized into the Internet.

loudmax|3 years ago

My favorite occurrence of "asshat" was by Metafilter moderator jessamin in 2006 justifying her decision to remove a comment. A bad argument made in good faith deserves a response, but trolling does not. Jessamin said that when she deletes a troll comment she didn't see the necessity in writing a letter explaining why:

Dear asshat, you're being an asshat. I deleted your asshat comment. Please stop the asshattery. Love, jessamin

This non-letter was set to music by her Metafilter co-moderator cortex: https://music.metafilter.com/480/Please-Stop-The-Asshattery

DoneWithAllThat|3 years ago

I’ve always associated this word with fark.com, I remember it being used frequently on that site around 2000.

oceanghost|3 years ago

I am not trying to start a pissing contest-- just to point out how personal everyone's perspective is-- I remember it being quite fashionable in the early 90s in my area.

zaps|3 years ago

Jamey Jasta the poor man’s Mike Muir

themodelplumber|3 years ago

> In the case of pronoun usage, it really comes down to: Are you being a nice person or an asshat?” — Steve Kleinedler (interviewed by Sarah Grey), Conscious Style Guide (consciousstyleguide.com), “Conscious Language in the American Heritage Dictionary,” 22 Feb. 2018

I had no idea this guide for not being an asshat existed. That's pretty interesting and could help a lot of would-be asshats who don't feel comfortable hiding in actions-not-words territory anymore.

https://consciousstyleguide.com/general/

Veen|3 years ago

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