Book Review
Rise of the A word: asholism, the first sixty years by Geoffrey Nunberg
Public affairs
It’s delightful for a respected linguist to take up the challenge of writing about an inelegant word that has become a staple of our spoken language.
Who else but Geoffrey Nunberg would have taken the term “jerk” and dissected it in a multitude of ways that describe and enhance our understanding (indeed appreciation) of this concept?
In the literal sense, Stupidrefers to someone’s anatomy; however, used in the popular colloquial form, Stupidrefers to someone’s personality or behavior.
It is the last meaning that Dr. Nunberg spends time skillfully dissecting, from his first literary appearance to the characteristics of those who represent the archetypes in our society.
Dr. Nunberg traces the use of vulgar language from the Victorian era of the 1920s to the spread of the A word by the military returning from WWII (and novelist Norman Mailer in The naked and the dead).
In an effort to describe who is an idiot or behaves in the idiot category, Dr. Nunberg aligned his definition with that of Barbara Walter. Among those often paired with the jerk tag are: Rush Limbaugh, Mel Gibson, Hank Williams Jr., Bill O’Reilly, Tiger Woods, Tom Cruise, Karl Rove, Donald Trump, Sarah Palin, and Mark Zuckerberg.
A personal deliberation about whether someone is a jerk, a jerk, or an idiot is more about personality than semantics. To paraphrase the famous phrase of the United States Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart regarding pornography: I can’t define one, but I recognize one when I see it.
Just as there are those who are specifically identifiable as jerks, Dr. Nunberg also has a definition of “anti-jerk.”
The anti-jerk is a new culture hero best represented by Clint Eastwood’s Dirty Harry. Other anti-jerks include Bruce Willis and Steven Seagal.
These antiheroes are tough, direct and disgruntled, according to Professor Nunberg. They are courteous to ordinary people, but abuse and despise criminals and those in the police hierarchy who prevent them from doing their job.
Rise of the A wordwould be incomplete if Professor Nunberg left out fool in political discourse. Your best example? Donald Trump. “Trump’s reputation as an asshole was firmly established before his flirtation with politics began.”
In his book, Dr. Nunberg defeats political broadcasters as those who truly qualify as personal and professional idiots. She gives an example of this behavior on the part of Ann Coulter when she gave a talk at the University of Ottawa in 2010. She was asked by a Muslim student how Muslims are expected to travel if they should not be allowed to travel by airplanes as Coulter had suggested. She replied, “Take a camel.”
Judging by the energy they give by grooming, teasing, and intimidating their guests and callers, a lot of those who are successful on radio shows, like in baseball, are the nice guys who end up at the bottom of the page. the division”.
“The problem with the political jerk,” argues the author, “is that he has made his way into everyday conversation, particularly in response to the politicization of manners associated with political correctness.”
In the end, the idiot does not help generate or maintain a useful and constructive dialogue. By its very definition, it is “designed to deny that very possibility” by dividing one group from another.
How do we avoid the jerk? As Dr. Nunberg suggests, “When someone acts like an idiot” on an important matter, “it is important not to answer in the same way, but” with the seriousness that the question requires. “
Dr. Nunberg is a distinguished professor of linguistics at the University of California at Berkeley.
