{"id":1995,"date":"2022-06-15T13:42:06","date_gmt":"2022-06-15T13:42:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2022\/06\/15\/on-stuff-and-ass\/"},"modified":"2022-06-15T13:42:06","modified_gmt":"2022-06-15T13:42:06","slug":"on-stuff-and-ass","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2022\/06\/15\/on-stuff-and-ass\/","title":{"rendered":"On &#8216;Stuff&#8217; and &#8216;Ass&#8217;"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><span style=\"font-family: georgia, palatino; font-size: 14pt;\">A <em>Substack<\/em> <a href=\"https:\/\/williamfvallicella.substack.com\/p\/on-stuff-and-ass?sd=pf\">language rant<\/a>. Excerpt:<\/span><\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span style=\"font-family: georgia, palatino; font-size: 14pt;\">&#39;Ass&#39; is another word gaining a currency that is already excessive. One wonders how far it will go. Will &#39;ass&#39; become an all-purpose&#0160;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.merriam-webster.com\/dictionary\/synecdoche\" rel=\"\">synecdoche<\/a>? Run your ass off, work your ass to the bone, get your ass out of here . . . ask a girl&#39;s father for her ass in marriage? In the expression, &#39;piece of ass&#39; the reference is not to the buttocks proper, but to an adjoining area. &#39;Ass&#39; appears subject to a peculiar semantic spread. It can come to mean almost anything, as in &#39;haul ass,&#39; which means to travel at a high rate of speed. I don&#39;t imagine that if one were hauling donkeys one could make very good time. So how on earth did this expression arise? (I had teenage friends who could not refer to a U-Haul trailer except as a U-Haul-Ass trailer.)<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A Substack language rant. Excerpt: &#39;Ass&#39; is another word gaining a currency that is already excessive. One wonders how far it will go. Will &#39;ass&#39; become an all-purpose&#0160;synecdoche? Run your ass off, work your ass to the bone, get your ass out of here . . . ask a girl&#39;s father for her ass in &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2022\/06\/15\/on-stuff-and-ass\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;On &#8216;Stuff&#8217; and &#8216;Ass&#8217;&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[242,6,7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1995","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-humor","category-language-matters","category-substack"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1995","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1995"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1995\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1995"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1995"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1995"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}