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Currently making the rounds is a video from Conan showing a standup appearance by the Finnish comedian Ismo Leikola. In his experience of learning English as a second language, he says, "I think the hardest word to truly master has been the word ass." He muses on the peculiar application of -ass as a slangy suffix in words like lazy-ass, long-ass, grown-ass, bad-ass, and dumb-ass.

Stan Carey discussed the video on the Strong Language blog ("A paradoxical-ass word"), and he links to Mark Liberman's 2014 roundup of scholarship on -ass (on Language Log and elsewhere), "Ignoble-ass citation practices."

Ismo's standup act has been the talk of the water cooler at Language Log Plaza. Victor Mair was reminded of ass-backwards: "I find it particularly amusing because, from the time I was a boy in Ohio, people used to spoonerize and euphemize it as bass-ackwards — and that just sounded really funny to me." Ass-backwards and bass-ackwards came up in my own contribution to -ass studies, the 2013 LL post, "Can '[adjective]-ass' occur predicatively?" There I quote one of the pioneers of the field, Diana Elgersma, in her 1998 paper, "Serious-ass morphology: the anal emphatic in English."

Although the origin of the '-ass' suffix is unclear, it would seem to have spread from a more restricted nominalizing morpheme, which attaches not only to adjectives, but also to verbs: bad-ass ('Check the dude in the leather jacket – he's a total bad-ass!'), hard-ass, slack-ass, whup-ass ('If you don't shut up, I'm gonna open up a big can of Texas-style whup-ass on ya.'), lazy-ass, stupid-ass and kiss-ass, for example. Note that many of these can also be used as emphatic adjectives (stupid-ass, lazy-ass, slack-ass, hard-ass).

One interesting case is the word backward. There are several variants with this particular base, including bass-ackward, backasswards (infixation), or the prefixed ass-backward. This latter variant can potentially be explained as an iconic reversal; that is, putting the normally suffixed '-ass' in a prefixed position is in itself backward. It is possible to have the attributive variant backward-ass ('That's one backward-ass idea'), however, this particular construction cannot occur as a predicate adjective: * 'That idea is backward-ass.'

Elgersma's treatment conflates ass-backward(s), bass-ackward(s), and backward(s)-ass as equal variants, but the history of these terms is rather complex. We can assume that ass-backward(s) came first, which was then euphemized through metathesis as bass-ackward(s). But while ass-backward(s) isn't attested by the Oxford English Dictionary and other sources until the 1930s, the spoonerism bass-ackward(s) can be found much earlier than that. In fact, it goes all the way back to the 1840s, when a young Abraham Lincoln was practicing law in Springfield, Illinois. As first documented by Emanuel Hertz in The Hidden Lincoln (1938), Lincoln wrote a note to a bailiff in one of the Springfield courts, and it was full of spooneristic humor. (It's unclear whether Lincoln came up with it himself or if he was simply repeating the work of another wag.)

He said he was riding bass-ackwards on a jass-ack through a patton-cotch on a pair of baddle-sags stuffed full of binger-gred when the animal steered at a scump and the lirrup-steather broke and throwed him in the forner of the kence and broke his pishing-fole.

(Image from the Chronicling Illinois website.)

The bass-ackwards euphemism got to be popular enough to stand on its own, as in the January 1884 issue of The Medical Summary (published in Lansdale, Penn.), which included this from the obstetrician G.O. Smith of Odessa, N.Y.:

I was suspected of incompetency by the friends, and I began to think every thing in obstetrical practice was going "bass ackwards" with me.

While bass-ackward(s) and the unsanitized ass-backward(s) became popular American expressions in the early 20th century, backward(s)-ass is a much later development, informed by the African-American colloquial use of -ass as documented by Arthur Spears in his 1998 article, "African-American language use: Ideology and so-called obscenity" (in African-American English, edited by Mufwene, Rickford, Bailey, and Baugh). Even though it has long been possible to call someone "a backward ass" (e.g., in The Other Mr. Barclay by Henry Irving Dodge, published in 1906), adjectival backward(s)-ass is much more modern. The earliest clear-cut example I can find is in the 1982 movie 48 Hours, where Eddie Murphy says: "I've never seen so many backwards-ass country fucks in my life."

All of this would likely be even more confusing to poor Ismo.

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