It is not necessarily a variation on "arse"--that's why I said to check the OED and be sure. How do you know, without checking, if American "ass" of today, in its full glory of meaning, is not a development of "ass", the donkey, and later, the fool?
You've got to stop making hair trigger judgments about how things MUST have gone in etymological history, simply on the basis of sound (and perhaps, a touch of nationalism). There are such things as false etymologies.
It is not necessarily a variation on "arse"--that's why I said to check the OED and be sure. How do you know, without checking, if American "ass" of today, in its full glory of meaning, is not a development of "ass", the donkey, and later, the fool?
You've got to stop making hair trigger judgments about how things MUST have gone in etymological history, simply on the basis of sound (and perhaps, a touch of nationalism). There are such things as false etymologies.
Every etymology I’ve checked, though (which granted, doesn’t include the OED, to which I don’t have ready access), says “ass” in the American sense is indeed a variation of “arse.”
@Enoch, on “bust” as a verb, as is often the case in the US, there’s the phrase “bust out of the joint” (escape ftom jail), as well as Carousel’s “June Is Bustin’ Out All Over.”
I've googled both words while reading this thread. Their etymologies are different, but I don't think I can provide links.
From what I’ve seen, and I certainly may be missing something, the etymologies of “arse” and of “ass” in the sense of donkey are different, but the etymology of “ass” in the sense of buttocks aligns with the etymology of “arse.” See, for example, the Online Etymology Dictionary entry on “ass”, which says this with regard to “ass” in the sense of buttocks:
slang for "backside," first attested 1860 in nautical slang, in popular use from 1930; chiefly U.S.; from dialectal variant pronunciation of arse (q.v.). The loss of -r- before -s- is attested in other words (burst/bust, curse/cuss, horse/hoss, barse/bass, garsh/gash, parcel/passel). Indirect evidence of the change from arse to ass can be traced to 1785 (in euphemistic avoidance of ass "donkey" by polite speakers) and perhaps to Shakespeare, if Nick Bottom transformed into a donkey in "A Midsummer Night's Dream" (1594) is the word-play some think it is.
I must to the barber's, mounsieur; for me thinks I am marvellous hairy about the face; and I am such a tender ass, if my hair do but tickle me, I must scratch.
My Merriam-Webster likewise gives two etymologies for “ass”—one for the sense of donkey and one for the sense of buttocks, the latter serving from “arse.”
I just checked the OED. "Ass" has as it's first recorded use for a reference to the rectum in aprox. 1672 in a book of games, coming from Devon, so the usage predates America, however "arse" is much older and "ass" is listed as a version of it. I can give more particulars if anyone is interested.
Thanks for the information on Canadian multilingualism. Apologies for underestimating how polyglot it is. I am, of course aware, of the Francophone areas and I did know that there are large Asian and other migrant communities.
There's an embarrassing level of ignorance about Canada among many British people. We really don't know much about it other than the Calgary Stampede and that they play Ice Hockey over there. I did see something about Saskatoon on Michael Portillo's Great Railway Journeys but I only watched it because NoProfit lives there and I wanted to see what it looked like. Interesting place by the looks.
So it's good to hear more about it.
That's nice of you. Saskatoon gave the world Joni Mitchell, Gordie Howe and Yann Martel. Along with lots of experiments with LSD, other hallucinogens. and the word psychedelic.
It's done in the style of a telenovela--a Spanish-language and -culture soap opera. A local station used to run it, and I liked it. You can watch the entire 52-episode course for *free*. (It looks like it *might* be limited to US and Canadian viewers, due to licensing. But YouTube also has copies of at least some epsodes.)
I double-checked the notes for teachers, and it works for both beginners and more advanced students. And the story's plot is good, too.
Anyway, since many of us are looking for some sort of distraction right now, I thought I'd pass this along.
Oh, and there's also "French In Action" (Learner.org). Similar sort of course, and it has a plot. But it's much more funny and silly.
Have fun!
ETA: The shows have closed captioning, a big help in getting used to the words.
I've not looked up the links yet, Gramps49 but English is, of course, a fusion of Germanic (Friesian) Anglo-Saxon and medieval Norman French with some later borrowings and consciously Latinate elements.
Initially, English (and this is before you can speak of 'Brits' as a geo-political entity) absorbed or was fused with Norman French, the language of the court and the nobility after the Norman conquest. So that wasn't a case of 'borrowing' so much as a form of fusion.
Later borrowings were more self-conscious because French was seen as more Latinate and therefore more sophisticated. Also, in some instances there may not have been an English equivalent. From the 16th century onwards there were conscious efforts to refine the language and to put it on a par with the classical languages of antiquity or the other major European languages. Shakespeare poked fun at this tendency.
US English appears to have absorbed loan words and terms from Dutch, German, Spanish, Yiddish and other languages, so it's not as if the 'Brits' are the only English speakers to borrow or steal terms from elsewhere. By and large this sort of thing happens organically of course, but from time to time there are conscious efforts to refine or define - Johnson's and Webster's dictionaries in their various ways, for instance or deliberate borrowings from the French in order to sound more sophisticated.
You completely missed out the Danelaw in that explanation of the origins of English. Which was quite important. Much of modern English grammar developed in the north of the country, from Norse borrowings, and then spread southwards.
By the way, am I the only person who's attempted to learn Danish?
My favourite English borrowing from Norse is undoubtedly the word "sky". In Norse/Danish it means "cloud", a misunderstanding that tells you a lot about that the prevailing weather conditions in northern England.
Just to stir the pot a bit more, in some demotic circles in the UK there is an increasing use of 'arsed' (past participle of the verb 'to arse'?) in the sense of 'bothered'. 'I know they expect you to sort out your rubbish for recycling, but I can't be arsed.' 'I didn't vote. I couldn't be arsed.'
To return to an earlier point, last night I came across the following line in an American novel: "Thank you for meeting with me so early". The "with" would not be there in British English.
To return to an earlier point, last night I came across the following line in an American novel: "Thank you for meeting with me so early". The "with" would not be there in British English.
Not in that context, but in others....
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two imposters just the same
Just to stir the pot a bit more, in some demotic circles in the UK there is an increasing use of 'arsed' (past participle of the verb 'to arse'?) in the sense of 'bothered'. 'I know they expect you to sort out your rubbish for recycling, but I can't be arsed.' 'I didn't vote. I couldn't be arsed.'
I expect quite soon, we will get, "I could be arsed", by analogy with that other one, which I can't remember.
Arsing around/around - mucking about - slightly nuanced difference when applied to oneself - "I've been arsing about with the settings for hours but it still beeps at 4am every night" Cf. dicking around, fannying about...
"Kids spent the afternoon dicking around in the stream"
"I just put a new tap on because I couldn't face fannying about with the washers on that knackered old one"
"Stop arsing about with that lighting fixture or you'll try yourself"
In the dear, dead days of film censorship, there was a St Trinian's (broad farce set in anarchic girls' school for the younger among you) in which Alistair Sim as the headmistress carefully enunciates 'I'll have no arson about in my school'.
@Gramps49 I loved watching the videos you linked to! (Never used the words scallion or spring onion. They were always called stinkers in our house, or green onions!)
It was this prestigious website where I first read the term "ass hat". Surprisingly, Daughter-Unit had heard the term long before I did. I had assumed (and am willing to be told otherwise) that this term came from the eastern side of the Pond.
@Orfeo, yes you're right, I didn't mention the Scandinavian influence.
I thought about that last night when catching up with a Norwegian 'Scandi-noir' crime drama on BBC i-Player.
One of the characters used a word for playing that sounded like 'lecking' - similar to the Yorkshire dialect word 'laiking' which was still current when I lived up there during the '80s.
There are still some Danish and other Norse words in northern English dialects as well as within standard English more broadly.
You are right. I should have included the Danish element.
Coming back to US English, it doesn't surprise me when CK tells us that there were terms that would generally be considered Americanisms in her native Dorset.
Nor would it surprise me if the Devonshire 'ass' noted from 1672 had been pronounced more like 'arse' with a long 'a' sound than the way 'ass' is pronounced in contemporary UK English - north and south - with a short 'a'.
Back in Chaucer's time I suspect 'arse' had a very strong 'r', more like the rolling Scottish r. 'Arrse.'
This would probably still been quite prominent in Elizabethan times but I suspect had softened by the late 1600s.
It would be interesting to trace when 'arse' became 'ass' in The New World (as it were).
I've heard it said that the speech of the Colonists in 1776 wouldn't have been that different from the English spoken in the British isles. Those with Scottish or Irish heritage would still have sounded like their cousins back across the Atlantic. Those with English heritage would have retained a broadly English way of speaking, although I suspect some variations must have begun to develop from the mid-1600s onwards. Heck, despite the thread's title, although we may be two nations divided by a common language, it's not as if we are mutually unintelligible even now.
@Gramps49 I can answer your question about why 'aubergine' comes from French, though I can't answer the one that accompanies it, as to why anyone should call a purple vegetable an 'egg plant'.
Aubergines don't really grow here. We're slightly too far north. Until about 50 years ago, you didn't see them in the markets. I'd never seen one until I travelled in southern Europe in the mid-sixties. People first met them on holiday on the continent and decided they'd like to have them at home. I suppose they could have chosen whatever is the Spanish or Italian for them but France is the nearest country they could come from. Besides, French is proud of its gastronomic reputation and fashionable for it. So if you're looking for a foreign word to give to something that you might want to encourage people to think of as a delicacy and worth paying for, there's always been a tendency to choose what the French call it. Likewise, I suppose 'courgette', though that's odder as they're little marrows which is a vegetable that has always been grown here.
But why 'egg plant'. I share the puzzlement of the millennials in the youtubes.
I was slightly intrigued about 'scallions' for spring onions as I thought that was an Irish expression for them.
On the Danish influence on English, I was told once that this was an important reason why English verbs don't change their endings as much as, say, French or German ones do. Apparently, or so it was alleged, often the root words in Anglo-Saxon and Viking were the same but the endings were different. People found they could still understand each other if they spoke in a slovenly way and dropped the endings. So this became a habit.
The OED says that the name was first given to the white variety, then became attached to the purple. First known use in print, a gardening book from 1767.
Wikipedia has a very interesting article on this fruit (actually a berry). Goes into detail about the origin of the names. "Aubergines" not actually French but a derivative of the Arabic bāḏinjān (Arabic: باذنجان). The article also shows some examples of white eggplant.
"Meet" and "meet with" have different meanings, or can. I can meet you at the coffee shop -- we bump into each other accidentally. Or I can meet with you -- we sit down and go over business together.
And then there’s “meet up,” as in “Let’s meet up at the coffee shop,” meaning we’ll get together at the coffee shop to then go wherever else we’re going.
"Meet" and "meet with" have different meanings, or can. I can meet you at the coffee shop -- we bump into each other accidentally. Or I can meet with you -- we sit down and go over business together.
And then there’s “meet up,” as in “Let’s meet up at the coffee shop,” meaning we’ll get together at the coffee shop to then go wherever else we’re going.
Yes -- to all three meanings.
There's also another meaning, as when something meets the criteria, for instance.
Then there's the noun, as in track meet or Shipmeet!
A courgette is a zucchini to us. Eggplants get called brinjal, but seldom aubergine in my hearing.
We eat beets. They're not called "beet root". The tops are "beet greens" and the varieties which are grown for the leaves are called "swiss chard"/
Turnips are called turnips. The terms rutabaga and swede are not used. I learned that these are all varieties of the same thing only within the past decade.
Turnips are called turnips. The terms rutabaga and swede are not used.
In Saskatoon.
In part this may be because until recent decades only rutabagas/swedes were known on the prairies (where I grew up), and turnips (the white ones) didn't exist, so far as we knew. But times have changed in most of Canada, and the world has moved on. Certainly in this part of Ontario, white turnips and yellow swedes/rutabagas are labelled and marketted thus.
Here, the red root vegetable is a 'beetroot' and the leaves are 'beetroot leaves'. I grumble about shops that sell beetroot with the leaves cut off as they are very tasty. 'Swiss chard' is a different vegetable here. It has red stalks though. 'Beet' used on its own is more likely to refer to sugar beet, which is inedible as a vegetable but widely grown for conversion into sugar. Turnips and swedes are similar root vegetables but different. The word 'rutabaga' is unknown. Swedes are neeps in Scotland.
A root vegetable I've got very fond of which wasn't much eaten until quite recently is celeriac. That's slightly odd, as I regard celery as a complete waste of time as a vegetable.
Another relatively recent - to me that is - culinary development is encountering beetroot used in cakes in much the way carrots are. As they're quite sweet, I think that works rather well.
Swiss chard comes with red, yellow or white stems, having bought packs with all three included. Most recently all my veggie box Swiss Chard has been white stemmed.
That's slightly odd, as I regard celery as a complete waste of time as a vegetable.
[tanget alert]
This reminds me of the time that my wife first tried to put celery in the tuna salad spread she had made for sandwiches. I had grown up with dill pickles in the spread, but not celery. This was about two months into our marriage. We knew the honeymoon was over then.
Now, after 43 years of marriage, I don't mind it as much.
A courgette is a zucchini to us. Eggplants get called brinjal, but seldom aubergine in my hearing.
We eat beets. They're not called "beet root". The tops are "beet greens" and the varieties which are grown for the leaves are called "swiss chard"/
Turnips are called turnips. The terms rutabaga and swede are not used. I learned that these are all varieties of the same thing only within the past decade.
Sweet potatoes and yams are different plants.
. Turnips are turnips and swedes are swedes. Zucchini and eggplant are called just that. None of this courgette and aubergine business. Mot beet root, but beetroot, the one word. Things get difficult with green leaves. There is spinach (really a variety of chard) and english spinach (the European variety). - and lots of other leaves these days brought by more recent arrivals, giving a variety our grandparents did not think existed.
Around here, Swede doesn’t mean anything other than a person from Sweden.
Ditto. And Zucchinis are only courgettes in British books and news outlets; same for eggplants and "aubergines". And I had never heard the name "brinjal." Swiss chard and beet greens are two different plants. Both tasty.
There's an old saw about how northerners eat the beets (roots) and throw the greens away, while southerners eat the greens and feed the beets (roots) to the pigs.
Something completely different. How on earth did we end up with a kerb on one side of the Atlantic and a curb on the other? (A lot of stores are offering curbside delivery around here at the moment).
Something completely different. How on earth did we end up with a kerb on one side of the Atlantic and a curb on the other? (A lot of stores are offering curbside delivery around here at the moment).
In Britain does one kerb one's appetite or curb one's appetite?
@mousethief we curb our appetites, and use curb as a verb. I'm in the UK.
Kerb is the side of the road, usually paved, giving kerbside deliveries. Locally there are various roads without kerbs that aren't a lot of fun to walk, but the footpaths across the fields don't connect without some walking some sections of road.
Apparently 'curb' is the older form, and both senses have the same ultimate origin (presumably because they both involve a border on things). For some reason 'kerb' took hold as a variant.
I'd use curb as a verb. It is also a noun - his actions were a curb on mob violence. I've only ever seen kerb as a noun to describe the side of a road (although from memory in the US it can also be used to mean the footpath/sidewalk).
(although from memory in the US it can also be used to mean the footpath/sidewalk).
Having lived in the U.S. my entire life, in different parts of the country, I've only heard it used to describe the edging of the road, usually made of concrete. If there is a sidewalk, the curb separates it from the street.
Comments
You've got to stop making hair trigger judgments about how things MUST have gone in etymological history, simply on the basis of sound (and perhaps, a touch of nationalism). There are such things as false etymologies.
@Enoch, on “bust” as a verb, as is often the case in the US, there’s the phrase “bust out of the joint” (escape ftom jail), as well as Carousel’s “June Is Bustin’ Out All Over.”
I've been wanting to revive what Spanish I learned, and I just unearthed the very good "Destinos: An Introduction To Spanish" series (Learner.org).
It's done in the style of a telenovela--a Spanish-language and -culture soap opera. A local station used to run it, and I liked it. You can watch the entire 52-episode course for *free*. (It looks like it *might* be limited to US and Canadian viewers, due to licensing. But YouTube also has copies of at least some epsodes.)
I double-checked the notes for teachers, and it works for both beginners and more advanced students. And the story's plot is good, too.
Anyway, since many of us are looking for some sort of distraction right now, I thought I'd pass this along.
Oh, and there's also "French In Action" (Learner.org). Similar sort of course, and it has a plot. But it's much more funny and silly.
Have fun!
ETA: The shows have closed captioning, a big help in getting used to the words.
Hear.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OEA_2lM1YdA
https://www.buzzfeed.com/watch/video/92691
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UuBnHS5hwI4
There is one question about why Brits seem to steal words from the French that should be answered.
Initially, English (and this is before you can speak of 'Brits' as a geo-political entity) absorbed or was fused with Norman French, the language of the court and the nobility after the Norman conquest. So that wasn't a case of 'borrowing' so much as a form of fusion.
Later borrowings were more self-conscious because French was seen as more Latinate and therefore more sophisticated. Also, in some instances there may not have been an English equivalent. From the 16th century onwards there were conscious efforts to refine the language and to put it on a par with the classical languages of antiquity or the other major European languages. Shakespeare poked fun at this tendency.
US English appears to have absorbed loan words and terms from Dutch, German, Spanish, Yiddish and other languages, so it's not as if the 'Brits' are the only English speakers to borrow or steal terms from elsewhere. By and large this sort of thing happens organically of course, but from time to time there are conscious efforts to refine or define - Johnson's and Webster's dictionaries in their various ways, for instance or deliberate borrowings from the French in order to sound more sophisticated.
By the way, am I the only person who's attempted to learn Danish?
My favourite English borrowing from Norse is undoubtedly the word "sky". In Norse/Danish it means "cloud", a misunderstanding that tells you a lot about that the prevailing weather conditions in northern England.
Not in that context, but in others....
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two imposters just the same
I expect quite soon, we will get, "I could be arsed", by analogy with that other one, which I can't remember.
Not really. Other creative uses though:
Arsing around/around - mucking about - slightly nuanced difference when applied to oneself - "I've been arsing about with the settings for hours but it still beeps at 4am every night" Cf. dicking around, fannying about...
"Kids spent the afternoon dicking around in the stream"
"I just put a new tap on because I couldn't face fannying about with the washers on that knackered old one"
"Stop arsing about with that lighting fixture or you'll try yourself"
Stream = Creek, Tap = Faucet.
People don't say dicking around any more, I do hear farting around and goofing around.
It was this prestigious website where I first read the term "ass hat". Surprisingly, Daughter-Unit had heard the term long before I did. I had assumed (and am willing to be told otherwise) that this term came from the eastern side of the Pond.
This was because I have never worked out why it was as funny as it was.
*90s Irish situation comedy, m'lud.
I thought about that last night when catching up with a Norwegian 'Scandi-noir' crime drama on BBC i-Player.
One of the characters used a word for playing that sounded like 'lecking' - similar to the Yorkshire dialect word 'laiking' which was still current when I lived up there during the '80s.
There are still some Danish and other Norse words in northern English dialects as well as within standard English more broadly.
You are right. I should have included the Danish element.
Coming back to US English, it doesn't surprise me when CK tells us that there were terms that would generally be considered Americanisms in her native Dorset.
Nor would it surprise me if the Devonshire 'ass' noted from 1672 had been pronounced more like 'arse' with a long 'a' sound than the way 'ass' is pronounced in contemporary UK English - north and south - with a short 'a'.
Back in Chaucer's time I suspect 'arse' had a very strong 'r', more like the rolling Scottish r. 'Arrse.'
This would probably still been quite prominent in Elizabethan times but I suspect had softened by the late 1600s.
It would be interesting to trace when 'arse' became 'ass' in The New World (as it were).
I've heard it said that the speech of the Colonists in 1776 wouldn't have been that different from the English spoken in the British isles. Those with Scottish or Irish heritage would still have sounded like their cousins back across the Atlantic. Those with English heritage would have retained a broadly English way of speaking, although I suspect some variations must have begun to develop from the mid-1600s onwards. Heck, despite the thread's title, although we may be two nations divided by a common language, it's not as if we are mutually unintelligible even now.
Aubergines don't really grow here. We're slightly too far north. Until about 50 years ago, you didn't see them in the markets. I'd never seen one until I travelled in southern Europe in the mid-sixties. People first met them on holiday on the continent and decided they'd like to have them at home. I suppose they could have chosen whatever is the Spanish or Italian for them but France is the nearest country they could come from. Besides, French is proud of its gastronomic reputation and fashionable for it. So if you're looking for a foreign word to give to something that you might want to encourage people to think of as a delicacy and worth paying for, there's always been a tendency to choose what the French call it. Likewise, I suppose 'courgette', though that's odder as they're little marrows which is a vegetable that has always been grown here.
But why 'egg plant'. I share the puzzlement of the millennials in the youtubes.
I was slightly intrigued about 'scallions' for spring onions as I thought that was an Irish expression for them.
On the Danish influence on English, I was told once that this was an important reason why English verbs don't change their endings as much as, say, French or German ones do. Apparently, or so it was alleged, often the root words in Anglo-Saxon and Viking were the same but the endings were different. People found they could still understand each other if they spoke in a slovenly way and dropped the endings. So this became a habit.
I've no idea if this is true.
Yes -- to all three meanings.
There's also another meaning, as when something meets the criteria, for instance.
Then there's the noun, as in track meet or Shipmeet!
We eat beets. They're not called "beet root". The tops are "beet greens" and the varieties which are grown for the leaves are called "swiss chard"/
Turnips are called turnips. The terms rutabaga and swede are not used. I learned that these are all varieties of the same thing only within the past decade.
Sweet potatoes and yams are different plants.
In Saskatoon.
In part this may be because until recent decades only rutabagas/swedes were known on the prairies (where I grew up), and turnips (the white ones) didn't exist, so far as we knew. But times have changed in most of Canada, and the world has moved on. Certainly in this part of Ontario, white turnips and yellow swedes/rutabagas are labelled and marketted thus.
A root vegetable I've got very fond of which wasn't much eaten until quite recently is celeriac. That's slightly odd, as I regard celery as a complete waste of time as a vegetable.
Another relatively recent - to me that is - culinary development is encountering beetroot used in cakes in much the way carrots are. As they're quite sweet, I think that works rather well.
[tanget alert]
This reminds me of the time that my wife first tried to put celery in the tuna salad spread she had made for sandwiches. I had grown up with dill pickles in the spread, but not celery. This was about two months into our marriage. We knew the honeymoon was over then.
Now, after 43 years of marriage, I don't mind it as much.
{/tangent]
Though I should acknowledge celery’s role (with onion and bell pepper) as part of the Holy Trinity of Louisiana Cajun and Creole cooking.
Ditto. And Zucchinis are only courgettes in British books and news outlets; same for eggplants and "aubergines". And I had never heard the name "brinjal." Swiss chard and beet greens are two different plants. Both tasty.
There's an old saw about how northerners eat the beets (roots) and throw the greens away, while southerners eat the greens and feed the beets (roots) to the pigs.
Oh yes! A lovely thing. (guess how we cook, much of the time?)
In Britain does one kerb one's appetite or curb one's appetite?
A sentence worthy of inclusion in a phrasebook for travellers.
Kerb is the side of the road, usually paved, giving kerbside deliveries. Locally there are various roads without kerbs that aren't a lot of fun to walk, but the footpaths across the fields don't connect without some walking some sections of road.