The Weird-Ass Use of 'Ass' to Beef Up Our Adjectives

I know that research that states "to my knowledge, no one has ever listed or discussed some of the interesting features of ass," sounds like its overlooking the groundbreaking 1992 work by Mix-a-lot et. Al, but Daniel Siddiqi's work isn't on "ass as noun." Siddiqi was looking at the word itself as a new, crazy-ass intensifier in the English language in a research snippet.

"I am a morphologist," Siddiqi told me in an email. "What that means in the realm of linguistics is that I study word-formation or how our brains (or cognition or minds or what-have-you) goes about building words. I have a secondary focus on non-standard English phenomena (non-standard in this case would be things that many people would consider "improper"). The affix -ass is an interface of those two pursuits."

I have no idea when it became part of my vocabulary, but phrases like "taking your sweet-ass time" became such a fixture that I can still picture my old roommate Mark telling me to hurry up in front of his boss's children, saying "quit taking your sweet"—conspicuous, single-syllable pause—"time." Real role model, that guy.

I didn't really think about "ass-as-suffix" being a very interesting verbal tic; it was just a way to add some vulgarity, familiarity, and severity to whatever I was saying, I guess. But as a triple-threat English/linguistics/cognitive science professor, Siddiqi has a professionally developed ear for these things and noticed how strange it was that it makes sense to say "It's one cold-ass day," but doesn't make sense to say "Today is positively cold-ass."

Sure, this isn't exactly the Higgs boson we're talking about here—a fact that Siddiqi is aware of and thus only devoted a "snippet" to the observation rather than a deep-ass dive into the subject—but the way we use "ass" as an intensifier could be demonstrating something about language and our minds.

"I proposed that the intensifier is an affix that attaches to an adjective as a suffix but what makes it special is that MUST come between the adjective and its noun," Siddiqi told me via email. "From the point of view of the formal linguistic theory, this is interesting, I claim, because being sensitive to the placement of the noun means that the affixed adjective is probably not built separately from the sentence and stored in our mental lexicon."

As the snippet came out a while back, I was disappointed to hear that Siddiqi hasn't followed up on his insight. "There isn't much more to know about it right now," he said. "That's the only reason I haven't followed up."

Linguistics, as a field of research, studies language as it is spoken, and things like the ass suffix reveals how we all intuitively know English works, without being taught by someone (I mean, probably). The way Siddiqi describes his work, it sounds pretty enviable.

"When I notice something like this and I think I might have something interesting to say about it, I pursue it, if only briefly," Siddiqi said. "I also have published on constructions like 'If I had've been there, I'd've seen it' which is striking because it has two 'have's where you might not expect them."

Sometimes, though, it doesn't work out. "I tried to say something interesting about the construction 'the shit out of" such as in formations like 'I kissed the shit out of my wife,' but alas that went nowhere and I had nothing publishable to say," he said.

I'm sure he'll find some insight to say the shit out of. Someone give this man a big-ass grant already!