From The Chronicle of Higher Education
A Social Offender for Our Times
By Evan R. Goldstein
"What are you working on?" is academe's standard conversation starter, and for the past five years Geoffrey Nunberg has had a nonstandard response: "a book on assholes."
"You get giggles," says the linguist at the University of California at Berkeley, "or you get, 'You must have a lot of time on your hands'—the idea being that a word that vulgar and simple can't possibly be worth writing about."...