Pronoun [was Finally!]

[Laurence Horn]

At 6:04 PM -0700 9/26/07, Jonathan Lighter wrote:
>Am disappointed to see that the authors of that article did not find
>the historical perspective in HDAS of any use or interest.

...and a very rich entry, or set of entries, it is.  I was just
thinking of "Don't let your mouth write a check your ass can't cash",
and that's in there with a couple of hits, under the 'ability and
determination' entry.  Wilson's friend's greeting ("How's your ass?")
makes an appearance too, from 1960 ("usu. considered vulgar"--like
virtually every other entry for _ass_, curiously enough!).

LH

>
>   Re-evaluating the evidence after more than a dozen years, I now
>feel that the exx. prior to 1916 are uncomfortably ambiguous, though
>not necessarily to be discounted, while the earliest, from no later
>than 1719., at least suggests the sort of context that helped
>inspire the idiom.
>
>   The 1916 is from the noted vulgarian T.S. Eliot, who also
>furnishes an early ex. of "bullshit."
>   He rhymes "klassic" with "made her ass sick."
>
>   JL

>
>"Arnold M. Zwicky" <zwicky at CSLI.STANFORD.EDU> wrote:
>   ---------------------- Information from the mail header
>-----------------------
>Sender: American Dialect Society
>Poster: "Arnold M. Zwicky"
>Subject: Re: Finally!
>-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>On Sep 26, 2007, at 2:24 PM, Wilson Gray wrote, to dInIs:
>
>
>>  How does the following, heard on the tube, strike you:
>>
>>  "Step your ass on into this house!"
>>
>>  I have a friend who's used to hearing this kind of construction, but
>>  he doesn't really understand it, He often greets me by saying, "How's
>>  your ass?" For a long time, I couldn't understand his interest in the
>>  state of my arse. Then it occurred to me that he had assumed that
>>  "your ass" in constructions such as that above was could simply be
>>  replaced by "you."
>
>ah, there's now a pulished account of "X's ass" for reference to
>persons and things:
>
>Beavers, John & Andrew Koontz-Garboden. 2006. A universal pronoun
>in English?. Linguistic Inquiry 37.3.503-513. Download final
>published version (via Ingenta):
>http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/linguistic_inquiry/v037/37.3beavers.pdf
>
>arnold
>
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