"Can't be arsed"

[Damien Hall]

Has this phrase penetrated into American English? For the uninitiated, it
means "Can't be bothered", but, I think, with an undertone (or just a tone)
of contempt for the task in question.

I wouldn't have thought it would penetrate very far, because AmE doesn't
use 'arse' but 'ass' for 'bottom', of course. However, searching for
another tem yesterday in Urban Dictionary, I came across the initialism
'CBA' for "Can't Be Arsed":

http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=CBA

UD users seem to approve of the term (at least the first few definitions of
'CBA' as "Can't Be Arsed" have more thumbs-up than thumbs-down), and yet,
from the spellings and so on elsewhere in the site, I believe most of UD's
users and commenters are American. As I say, this is surprising to me, as
'arse' isn't used in AmE, though it's true that (through phonological
similarity and cultural familiarity) it isn't entirely opaque to AmE
speakers either.

Among the UD expansions of 'CBA' there are, of course, options that are
entirely different to "Can't Be Arsed" ("Cock, Balls, Ass", "Certified
Badass"), but "Can't Be Arsed" is the most numerous one; and there is, of
course, also one expansion of it to "Can't Be Asked", an eggcornish version
which (also?) appears in British English.

Damien

--
Damien Hall

Accent and Identity on the Scottish-English Border
Department of Language and Linguistic Science, University of York

Tel. +44 (0)1904 322665
Fax  +44 (0)1904 322673

http://www.york.ac.uk/res/aiseb
http://www.york.ac.uk/language/staff/academic-research/damien-hall/
http://www.york.ac.uk/hrc/

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