From the San Francisco Chronicle
'Ascent of the A-Word,' by Geoffrey Nunberg
By Glenn C. Altschuler
In 1976, Tom Wolfe took note of the newfound popularity of a vulgar old word. "Asshole is the going insult this year," Wolfe wrote. The epithet appears, without preliminaries, without a moment's notice: "It's a chorus! A reprise! An opera! A regular Asshole Rigoletto."...
In this delightfully and devilishly trenchant and provocative book, Nunberg traces the use of common and coarse language by well-bred, well-educated critics of Victorian prudery in the 1920s; the spread of the A-word by returning World War II servicemen (and novelist Norman Mailer in "The Naked and the Dead"); the penchant for obscenities by dissenters in the 1960s and '70s; and, most importantly, changes in ideas about civility, compromise and social class (marked by a shift from power and wealth to lifestyle and attitude as the criteria for membership in the "elite"), which paved the way for asshole to become a staple in middle-class conversation and for assholism to become entrenched in political discourse.
Nunberg dissects his subject with style and surgical precision....