THE IDEA THAT America harbors an epidemic of “assholism,” as Geoffrey Nunberg has it, is one that most people would spontaneously accept before feeling an urge to temper it. No doubt people in 1932 or 1872 had a similar feeling that their age was coarser than the last. Nunberg knows that they did, but he proposes that assholism is more rampant in society than ever before. This latter thesis, despite yielding some deft anthropology, is less successful than the first.

Nunberg rightly denies that we are less “civil” than in past eras, with their scurrilous journalism and endless complaints about bad manners in the streets. He usefully notes that the very word incivility “doesn’t belong to the moral vocabulary of everyday English, like polite, rude, and courteous; it is a word we learn from op-ed pieces, not at the family dinner table,” almost requiring, in its utterance, “simplistic narratives of cultural decay.” Nunberg zeroes in not on the “bounder” but on the asshole, which he defines as someone with a “culpable obtuseness”—think Malvolio rather than Iago—with a “brazen effrontery” (Kanye West comes to mind). Nunberg is entertainingly particular about the definition: “You can be an asshole for abruptly cutting into a line of cars waiting in the left-turn lane, but probably not for failing to signal a turn or texting while you drive. You can be an asshole for cheating on your wife or your girlfriend, but not for cheating on your expense reports or a final exam.”

Since the asshole has enough self-awareness to know the inconvenience he causes, we are less likely to apply the term to the foreign or unknown. Even if we knew that Osama bin Laden maltreated his wives and subordinates, we would be unlikely to call him an asshole. “Asshole” seems inapplicable to even the brattiest of children, and “men are even more likely to confess to having been an asshole than having been a prick”—that is, someone unsavory to the core of their being.

Nunberg is correct that asshole cannot be dismissed as lazy verbal vagueness just because it is profane. Meanings can be both vulgar and precise: we have a more particular sense of what raunchy is than prurient, and we know that prick means something more than the Oxford English Dictionary’s hazy “a vulgar term of abuse for a man.” Asshole is not even a substitute for a politer equivalent: “bug off and scram are slang for go away, and chuck and deep-six are slang for discard. But for us today, asshole isn’t a colorful substitute for jerk or boor.” Asshole occurs to most of us more immediately than either.

That happened rather recently. The first literary attestation of asshole is in Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead: “Lieutenant (sg) Dove, USNR. A Cornell man, a Deke, a perfect asshole.” Yet at the same time Orville Prescott, reviewing the book in the New York Times, could still sniff in reference to the book’s obscene language: “It is probably truthful reporting, but it is unnecessarily offensive and marvelously tiresome.” In 1950, The Catcher in the Rye’s Holden Caulfield, for all of his contempt for “phonies,” said goddam and hell but never fuck up, No shit or asshole; Nunberg points out that “adolescent boys didn’t yet talk that way.”