A FEW years ago a viral video about a beached whale poked fun at Kiwi English. “I’m beached as!”, the whale cried. The dialogue was, of course, exaggerated for (mostly Australians’) amusement. But as with most caricature, it did pick up on real traits. The intensive “as” is a distinctive feature of slang in New Zealand and Australia: a great movie might be “sweet as”, and a brisk night “cold as”, for example.



The usage seems to have originated as the front end of a comparison, as in “sweet as pie” or “cold as Siberia” (or, possibly, some more vulgar similes). Uses range from the idiomatic (especially “sweet as”) to the one-off: "as" can, in principle, follow any adjective or, indeed, participle (including “beached”). The construction has not yet made it into the Oxford English Dictionary, in which the entry for “as” already comprises 35 meanings. The Macquarie Dictionary, an Australian publication, has an entry for the intensifier "as" but offers no clue when it first appeared. In fairness, there is little research on the usage. A short paper in English Today is the seminal work.



When I lived Down Under, at first I mistook the austral “as” for the more familiar North American intensifier, “-ass”, as in "sweet-ass". It too has yet to be recognised by the OED (though the dictionary does present a rather fun list of other "asses"). Merriam-Webster, an American dictionary, duly includes it as a postpositive intensive. It gives the example “fancy-ass” and claims, without elaboration, that the usage was first attested around 1920.



“Ass” used this way is certainly common nowadays. The idiom was written about as early as 1992. It appears in the form "cold-ass" in the song “Thrift Shop”, which currently tops American pop charts. The movie "Kick-Ass" topped the box office in 2010. But it is still considered a bit naughty. Last month news outlets like NPR were tickled by a proposed new “kick-ass” slogan for Kentucky.



Mistaking “as” for “-ass” could thus be forgiven. Both idioms are unusually similar. And yet they do not seem to be etymologically related. Besides being less vulgar, “as” is much younger than “-ass”. The origins of “as” as a truncated simile are clearer. They are pronounced differently. Most likely it is a mere coinicidence. After all, slang abounds in intensifiers—super, real, hella, you name it. Either way, the convergence is certainly interesting as.