The Scent of Entitlement
[A book review for Literary Review, by Michael Bywater.]
With Americans, it’s bottoms, bottoms, bottoms. ‘Get your ass out of the sling’; ‘Let’s get our asses into gear here, guys’; ‘Okay, dudes, let’s go kick ass’, and so on. They need a euphemism. If every time they mentioned asses a Goatse (pronounced ‘goat-see’ and if you don’t know what that is DO NOT GOOGLE IT because – really – you will be sorry) sprang to the American mind, they’d soon change their ways. Which would be a shame, particularly when it comes to the full, metaphorico-anatomically explicit version: not the ass but the asshole.
Before we continue, let’s clarify one thing: an arsehole is not an asshole. My edition of S J Perelman’s letters begins with a majestic declension of Yiddish insults, from the humble shlemiel to the malign and virulent paskudneh. Many of these – the klutz, the shmendrick, the shlemazl, the trombenik, just for starters – are subsets of the arsehole. But none of them are assholes. …. Continue reading here.
