I was reminded that I’d been meaning to write about this one by a Facebook friend who linked to an ad posted on Craigslist, 4/24/12: “I am in need of someone who will cook (not microwave) and dangle bacon in front of my starving face while running to the YMCA. The objective is to trick my arse into working out. “
The OED’s first citation for arse, with that spelling, to refer to a person or animal’s posterior is from 1480. There are multitudinous variations over the years, including this exchange from Ben Jonson’s 1602 “Poetaster”: ” Cris. They say, he’s valiant. Tvcc. Valiant? so is mine arse.” Ooh, snap.
The common and traditional U.S. term, of course, is ass. The OED says of this word: “vulgar and dialect sp. and pronunciation of arse. Now chiefly U.S.”
Its citations for ass are nearly all American, one exception being this from William Golding’s 1959 Free Fall: “You sit on your fat ass in your ‘ouse all the week.”
Arse and ass look different in print. However, in Britain, where non-rhotic (that is, silent r) pronunciation is the standard, they would sound the same. This site offers British and American pronunciations of arse. The former is non-rhotic. The latter is risible in the exaggerated New York accent it affects.
In My Fair Lady (Broadway: 1956, film version: 1964), written by the American Alan Jay Lerner, Eliza Doolittle famously shouts out at the racetrack scene, “Come on, Dover, move yer bloomin’ arse!” That, anyway, is the spelling one finds on the internet; I don’t have access to the libretto or screenplay. I also don’t have access to the Broadway or soundtrack record albums. I would suspect that Julie Andrews, the original Liza, says it non-rhotically; probably Audrey Hepburn in the movie version as well. Someone please let me know if that’s not the case.
Arse has been around for a long time in the U.S. as a sort of literary novelty item. Donald Barthleme’s first novel, “Snow White,” contained a chapter titled THE FAILURE OF SNOW WHITE’S ARSE. A 1971 letter by the anglophile S.J. Perelman noted that some New Yorker contributors ”tend to have a ramrod up their arse, acting as though they invented the paper.” (I would say that paper, to refer to a magazine, is a Britishism as well.)
Moving up to the present, arse has become a vogue term in the U.S. in recent years, very much analogous to shite. A 2010 comment on a New York Times blog post by someone who signs him- or herself “AmericanYankee” says: “The last thing I want is for bin Laden and his sycophantic arse kissing illiterate supporters to think they are somehow special.”
Just two days ago, blogging his displeasure about the New York Times at Esquire.com just two days, Charles Pierce comments, “This is all my arse.” And bringing it all back home, a commenter on his post writes, “The Times is, for the most part, irrelevant, and this sort of link-trolling crap should be ignored. It only encourages more shite.”
I use this word way too much (unfortunately), but in the context of using it to replace “bother”, as in “I can’t be arsed to leave the house today.” Not old enough to know how Julie Andrews would’ve said it, but all I can say is I haven’t heard anyone here in the UK pronounce it non-rhotically.
SO would it be correct to assume that while “ass” can also be used to refer to a donkey that “arse” cannot?
“In Britain, where non-rhotic (that is, silent r) pronunciation is the standard, they would sound the same.”
This isn’t true, at least not of any Brits I know. Americans might pronounce “arse” like ass, but Brits don’t. Long a versus short a.
Same thing with the British and American pronunciation of “bastard” (though the spelling is the same in this case): baaaarstard v. bastard.
And to Sarah — yes, ass can be a donkey, arse could only be the rear end of a donkey: an ass’s arse. Fortunately we have “horse’s ass” as a useful critique of a foolish person, so don’t need another version of same — although my well-spoken parents, who’d never have said “arse,” were willing at times to describe someone as a “silly ass” (as in donkey). I believe ass (again, donkey) is one of the few surviving Celtic words in the English language.
“I believe ass (again, donkey) is one of the few surviving Celtic words in the English language.”
I believe you’re wrong; “ass” as in donkey had a Pedigree – it’s straight out of Latin.
Asinus, I think: the scientific name is equus africanus asinus.
You’ll hear “bastard” pronounced with both long and short “a” in different parts of Britain – the North East, particularly, uses a very short “a”, and a non-rhotic second syllable too. I’m not sure about the whole of Scotland, certainly Glaswegians would use a short “a”, but I’m not sure that that would be true of the whole of the country.
I never saw Julie Andrews on stage, but you can see and hear Hepburn’s pronunciation here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y3ywa-9Cu4M. Experts here can tell me if it’s rhotic or not.
I’m a bit too young to remember Julie Andrews playing Eliza Doolittle, but those of us who grew up with her as Mary Poppins probably find it a little difficult to imagine her using the word at all…
You’ve not seen S.O.B. then- in which she gets her tits out?
@Ben:
Arse and ass look different in print. However, in Britain, where non-rhotic (that is, silent r) pronunciation is the standard, they would sound the same.
You have opened a can of worms here, Ben.
First, Scots will rightly take offen{s|c}e at the claim that non-rhotic pronunciation is standard “in Britain”.
Secondly, the pronunciation of “ass” with the vowel of “fAther” or “spA” is extremely old-fashioned, possibly obsolete, in England. Almost everyone pronounces it with the vowel of trAp these days — meaning that it does not sound the same as “arse”.
It’s not just Scots who will take offence; so will people from Lancashire. And pirates. When you “talk like a pirate” you emulate Robert Newton’s Dorset accent in Disney’s Treasure Island.
Not true I’m afraid. Pretty much everyone south of the Midlands pronounces “arse” as it is spelt – like the beginning of the word “arsenal”. Occasionally people will say “ass” but usually that’s for effect.
……and pretty much everyone north of the Midlands!
People north and south of the Midlands and everywhere else as well will pronounce it as it is spelt. The spelling is susceptible of more than one pronunciation.
Ahem! “However, in Britain, where non-rhotic (that is, silent r) pronunciation is the standard, they would sound the same.” That’s like, totally racist, man. England, please.
It’s kind of an interesting pronunciation though, because it varies enormously from place to place. I thought it changing to “ass” in American English was due to immigration from England’s West Country, where “arse” would be pronounced “aaaas” (ooh arr (look, I had a West Country accent as a child; I’m allowed)). Write that down as it sounds and you get “ass”.
An American friend of mine said they liked the word “arse” because it sounds more contemptuous. I can kind of see that.
“Arse”/”Ass” is one of a group of words where some dialects lost R before S many centuries ago (well before any English colonialists had set foot in the New World). The R-less versions are often more prominent in today’s American English.
Other examples are “burst”/”bust” and “curse”/”cuss”.
But we all arse-around. No one ass-arounds, do they?
In 50+ years in California, I’ve never heard the expression. It’s familiar from UK writing only.
The non-rhotic pronunciation is based on Received Pronunciation and its variations, stemming from the dialect of southeastern England. The Scots and the Irish, the Welsh and various other dialects in the United Kingdom, pronounce the “r,” in many cases trilling it (in Scotland, for example).
“I would say that paper, to refer to a magazine, is a Britishism as well.”
Not, I think – in nearly 40 years in journalism, I’ve never heard any British journo call a “mag” a “paper”. “Paper”, in my experience, is only used to refer to the newsprint product, not anything printed on glossy stock.
So…nobody uses it? Trade jargon?
The Economist uses this regularly to refer to itself; I assume because it is focused on news, like a newspaper?
RR – No: it’s because the Economist is pretentious. To call a magazine a paper sounds very ‘superior’ to my ears. Some people in Britain do so, but they usually think they are of ‘superior’ stock. They would see it as beneath them to read a mere magazine.
To add to the above a a Welshman I can vouch that the R is very much pronounced – even my Scottish friends are amazed at the way I roll mine. I can go back to the early – mid 70s – when I was in infant school, and recall my great aunts and uncles having a conversation based on the fact that an Arse was either a bum or a stupid person, an Ass was always an animal.
Oh aye, the Welsh “r” is amazing! I’m with you on the “ass only as an animal” thing. I’ve never, ever taken to it as another word for arse, the blame for which I lay on reading so much Chronicles of Narnia as a child. The characters were continually saying things like “don’t be such an ass, Peter!”, obviously meaning “donkey”. Read the other way, it sounds like the Pevensies have gone street, thrown away their swords and shields and started bustin’ caps in people’s…er… donkies.
My trio of musicians, 3R Souls, have gone non-rhotic *despite* the lack of the “a.”
It makes us feel cool and rebellious.
You know, cool and rebellious fifty-year-old businessmen with instruments. . . .
For what it’s worth, “arse” has always been the preferred form in Atlantic Canada, where the (generally very much rhotic) English has very strong Irish and Scottish (and, on Newfoundland, West Country) influences.
Following a heavily soiled van through London I noticed that someone had inscribed in the dirt on the back, ‘R.Send’.
Arse and ass would sound nothing like each other in the north of England either. And being half Welsh (mongrel that I am), my Welsh relatives would roll the r and make sure it was rhotic with knobs on!
The only places in England that might have a long enough ‘a’ in ass to make it sound like arse would be the West Country and South Shropshire. Don’t know what an old Gloucestershire accent might do to it.
As for shite, I long ago assumed it to be the Northern English variant but it is the old form in both Northumbrian English (ancestor of Northern English and the English spoken in Scotland) and Midland English (ancestor of modern English). It probably just hangs on in the north of England because we’re linguistically conservative.
I don’t hear ‘aaaas’ in a “west country” (Somerset, Dorset, Devon) rendering, certainly not when the word was bandied about abundantly in Bristol when I lived there. ‘Aaass’ sounds more like Norfolk to me.
I have heard for many years the expression ‘Gob shite’ as someone who talks a load of bollocks.Discuss
Ass probably is Latin. Quite a few Welsh words came from Latin as they lived underoman rule for about 360 years, so a ‘Celtic’ origin would have looked plausible.
What is in question is the origin of “donkey”. No-one is quite sure where it comes from- the first cite of it is in 1784. One theory is that it largely replaced “ass” because of prissiness (as rabbit replaced coney and rooster replaced cock, especially in America).
Perhaps already addressed but we British (I am English, living in the western USA) do indeed pronounce our R’s (we consider the Americans to multiply the R’s in words) – no non-rhetoric pronunciation standard at all by the Brits. Ass and Arse are not the same word with merely a different spelling, we have both in our vocabulary; Ass means donkey or mule (in my childhood we’d often call someone a donkey as a polite insult) and Arse means your rearend/bum/backside/butt <== this last term is terribly American.
Even for a non-rhotic person (like me, as Londoner), arse and ass are pronounced completely differently – I pronounce arse as “aaase” and ass as, well, “ass”.
Reminds me of the old limerick which works in print, but spoken would only work in AmE:
There was a young girl from Madras
Who had a most glorious ass
Not rounded and pink, as you probably think,
But grey, with long ears and ate grass.
Sorry, I meant it works in either language when spoken, but only in AmE when on paper.
That depends on how you pronounce Madras. It is usually “Madrarss” in England.
Depends where you live surely. I’ve always pronounced it as “M’dras”
“However, in Britain, where non-rhotic (that is, silent r) pronunciation is the standard” – it may be in RP (Received Pronunciation as used by the aristocracy and formerly by the BBC), and in many parts of England, but it would be misleading to imply that it’s by any means universal in the UK. The Scots and Northern Irish pronounce ‘r’s in every circumstance, as do people in surprisingly large swathes of England – in the southwest from Bristol right through to Cornwall, virtually the whole of East Anglia, plus populous parts of the north such as Lancashire.
Indeed it causes regular grumbling when the London-centric media and advertising industries invariably make puns or use wordplay which only work with non-rhotic pronunciation – I used to walk past an estate agent’s in London every day whose slogan was “Baron’s Court – Highly Sought”….
Even in RP, the R is pronounced- look at any Hugh Grant film.
Ass rhymes with grass- arse rhymes with farce.
I’ve never heard any Brit pronounce arse the same as ass, except possibly in the phrase “silly ass” – but who’s to know whether the speaker meant a grey animal or a backside- either works.
I’m pretty sure that Hugh Grant would pronounce Grass much more like farce that short-”a”- Ass.
And a Brit saying “Silly ass” will almost always mean the animal, and generally mean it as quite a mild term.
Ass only rhymes with grass (short ‘a’) if you’re from somewhere Oop ‘t North (of England). For a non-rhotic Southerner, arse (ahss) rhymes just fine with grass (grahss) as well as farce (fahss) – but ass is still distinct.
If a British speaker says “silly ass”, then that’s what they say – otherwise it would definitely be “silly arse”, whether or not the r was clearly pronounced. The difference is in the vowel length.
Jon H – Yes, except that ‘just fine’ is a grizzly Americanism. To my English ears it should be something like ‘…rhymes perfectly with…’
Seems reasonable for an advertisement of an estate agent in London to rhyme court with sought, that’s how I as a Londoner would pronounce court. My wife, who grew up in Wiltshire, regularly teases me for pronouncing “warm” as “waam”.
It’s definitely more of a middle-class thing isn’t it? I think most working-class Londoners would find it a slightly odd conjunction.
“…in the southwest from Bristol right through to Cornwall…”
and Oxfordshire, Berkshire, Hampshire, Wiltshire, and still common in Sussex and Kent.
“Arse and ass look different in print. However, in Britain, where non-rhotic (that is, silent r) pronunciation is the standard, they would sound the same.”
Nope. “Ass” uses the same type of “a” sound as “apple” in Britain, non-rhotic pronunciation is pretty much never applied to it. For the rear end, we say “arse” and we spell it “arse” too – we don’t say “arse” thinking it’s spelled “ass”.
Or ‘spelt’?
Spelled or spelt are both acceptable past forms of “spell”- check your OED. If anything, the irregular form “spelt” is losing ground to the regular “spelled”, especially among those who use “spelt” for an ancient strain of wheat.
Being from Yorkshire, son of Scots, both my parents and I would very definitely pronounce the ‘a’ of ‘arse’ as a long vowel, however they would very much pronounce the ‘r’ as well, whereas I would not. The words ‘arse’ and ‘ass’ in a Yorkshire accent may both be non-rhotic, but sound nowt like each other due to the length of the vowel.
I suspect you may have to explain ‘nowt’ to our American friends!
At the risk of opening another can of worms, I was totally mystified by the whole long/short ‘a’ business when I first moved to England – as you’ll know they’re all exactly the same length in Scotland!
There was a vowel shift some centuries back- from a flat “a” to a long “a” in a lot of words (e.g. “grass” became “graarse”). Parts of the country shifted again, mainly the North, but the South on the whole didn’t. There are similar issues over words like “scone” – I would rhyme it with “gone”, ‘er indoors would rhyme it with “stone”.
“I asked the maid in dulcet tone
To being to me a buttered scone
The silly girl has been and gone
And brought to me a buttered scone.”
The irish pronunciation of Arse definitely uses the “R” as in “arrrrrrse” . You can hear it in this video from the tv series father Ted (along with an irishism, “feck”)
All the British people in Japan laugh their arses off at the Japanese pronunciation of “earth”. Especially when combined with a powerful aerosol insecticide.
Reading a book with the unfortunate line
‘…adding a small pen-knife to my arse-
nal….’
which didn’t all fit on one line. I laughed and winced – sounds painful!
An amusing thread!
I’ve always considered that the American expression: “(couldn’t give a ) rat’s ass” sounds so much better in its ‘native’ form – probably due to the preceding short ‘a’ in ‘rat’. Even as a Briton, I wouldn’t dream of saying ‘rat’s arse’ – even if I could be arsed!
Don’t you ever get rat-arsed?
I can think of only two occasions when I’ve heard “ass” pronounced as “arse” in UK English. Back in the sixties, the ventriloquist Ray Alan had a dummy called Lord Charles, whose catchphrase was “What a silly ass”, but with the long ‘a’ which made it sound like “arse”. Very naughty on the BBC in those days but he got away with it.
Edith Sitwell’s verses for William Walton’s musical work Facade has a couplet that rhymes “ass” with “pass” and “grass”: “Long steel grass – The white soldiers pass – The light is braying like an ass”. With my London accent, only the first two would rhyme. When the BBC were comparing recordings of the work a few years ago, only two reciters made all these words rhyme. One was Sitwell herself and the other was an American, and. of course they used different vowel sounds.
This long ‘a’ sound, a southern and posh pronunciation, also survived into the sixties in the word “plastic”. If you watch the film A Clockwork Orange, the scene where Alex goes to prison and the warder is taking an inventory of his possessions, the warder says, “One comb, plahstic.”
You’re *assuming* he meant “silly ass.” Perhaps he meant “Silly arse”. I’ve never heard even soft shandy-drinking southerners like Hugh Grant say “ass” to sound like “arse”.
“Arse” has never been one of the Forbidden Words you couldn’t say on the Beeb (or not since the 60s, anyway). You just couldn’t say it before mid-evening.
Well, in some respects he meant both, but he could only get away with it because the upper classes in those days did pronounce “ass” with a long ‘a’. This was the early sixties, and on a programme on early enough in the evening for me to be watching it – I would have been about ten at the time. I knew “arse” was a rude word, and this would probably have been the first time I heard it on TV.
But if you really want to hear someone pronounce “ass” as “arse”, try the Sitwell recording of Facade. I think it’s available on Spotify. She was born in 1887, so it’s probably an accent that has died out now.
I’m surprised this has gone on so long, and I think there is a fundamental misunderstanding. This has nothing to do with northern/southern dialects – even southerners who pronounce “pass” to rhyme with “parse” don’t do the same with “ass”. If they say “arse” then they mean arse, not donkey.
Over thirty years in the army I must have heard most British dialects, not to mention plentiful use of the word “arse”, and I can’t think of one in which “ass” and “arse” are not readily distinguishable. Even when the “r” is not pronounced it still modifies the vowel sound. The “a” in “arse” sounds like the “a” in “hard”, irrespective of whether the “r” is pronounced; the “a” in “ass” sounds like the “a” in “gas”. I don’t believe either southern Brits or Americans fill their cars up with garse.
As a youngster I lived near Baaath(Bath) my wife from oop north says BAth, hard A.I also lived near Froooom(Frome) but my wife ,or any one not from Somerset would call it FrOme,hard O.
On a side note, I had always thought that the word “ass,” as in a donkey, is where the word “ass” as in …well…ass… came from. You know, “Get off your ass,” Get off and walk, don’t be a lazy arse and let the ass carry you all the way!” Of course, I couldn’t be arsed to tell you how that came out of my ass.
Nah. It’s a latin root- Asinus, probably via the French “Âne”
Arse and ass are definately pronounced pronounced differently. “ass” as in a’-ss an “arse” as in aaaarrrr-s
Aye, ‘arse’ and ‘ass’ do sound different everywhere in the UK. However, ‘barrrstarrrd’ is a more southern way of saying the word, whereas in the North there’d be some who said it like that (but with less emphasis on the R sounds) and some who pronounced it with short As.
Just stumbled across this blog, and very much enjoying it. Good show and top hole, old bean!