The South Are We Going to Have to Kick Your Ass Again
Civil War Correspondence Suggests the Phrase "Kick Ass" Might Be a Century Older Than We Idea
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Thismail originally appeared onStrong Language, a sweary web log nigh swearing.
A new online archive of Civil War correspondence promises to shed light on historical varieties of nonstandard American English. Ii linguists, Michael Ellis (Missouri State University) and Michael Montgomery (University of South Carolina), have teamed upwards with historian Stephen Berry (University of Georgia) to create "Private Voices," an annal of messages from Ceremonious War soldiers. Based on correspondence collected past Ellis and Montgomery as function of the Corpus of American Civil State of war Letters, the Private Voices archive focuses on the writing of soldiers who were "untrained in spelling, punctuation, or the use of capital letter messages," according to the press release announcing the launch of the site (which you can read here).
Soon after news of the annal was shared on the American Dialect Club mailing list, Jonathan Lighter (writer of the Historical Lexicon of American Slang) began looking for hidden treasures. He swiftly turned up a letter from 1862 in which the writer, an infantryman from Virginia, appears to express a tearing sentiment: "I want to kick ass."
Y'all can read the whole letter here. The writer was John B. Gregory of Pittsylvania County, Virginia, serving in Company B of the 38th Virginia Infantry. His letter is dated February. 17, 1862, from a camp virtually Manassas Junction. (This was in between the first and second battles of Balderdash Run, or the battles of Manassas as they were known in the South.) In the letter of the alphabet, Gregory writes to the folks dorsum dwelling, "old capen gilburt is doun her doing All he Can to become us to volenter Agan he Recall evry one orter stay" (i.e., "Former Captain Gilbert is down here doing all he can to go us to volunteer again; he thinks everyone ought to stay"). And then, in between the lines right to a higher place "one orter stay," Gregory adds, "I desire to kicking ass."
At to the lowest degree that's what it looks like. Only was Gregory suggesting he wanted to kick Old Captain Gilbert'south ass — or did he want to "kick ass" in general? Jonathan Lighter notes on ADS-L, "Something sounds a piffling off about 'boot ass,' but I don't know how to interpret it except in the electric current sense." The "electric current sense" is defined past Lighter'southward Historical Dictionary of American Slang as follows:
kick ass [or (euphem.) butt or tail] one Esp. Mil. to enforce one'due south say-so or otherwise assert oneself mercilessly or pugnaciously; (too) (prob. the orig. sense) to subdue others by beatings…
2. to inflict penalty or defeat (in general). — usu. considered vulgar.
The earliest citation given in HDAS is from exactly one hundred years after the 1862 letter:
1962 Killens Heard the Thunder 44 [ref. to WWII]: Them Japs are boot asses and taking names [in the Pacific].
Jonathon Green takes the expression back a scrap farther, to 1956, in his more recent work, Green'southward Dictionary of Slang:
1956 N. Algren Walk on the Wild Side 78: I'm so tired of kickin' asses I only retrieve I'll starting time burdensome skulls.
Could the Ceremonious War alphabetic character really represent an antedating of virtually a century? It's true that obscene language can persist for decades in oral use before actualization in print, merely it's hard to believe boot ass could have stayed under the radar for that long. However, the transcription here looks accurate.
Regardless of how we interpret the letter of the alphabet, this is just one tantalizing example of many that should turn upwardly in the Private Voices archive as the site grows. Information technology launched with iv,000 messages from 4 Southern states (North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, and Alabama), and according to the press release, half dozen,000 more transcribed letters from New England, the Northeast, and the Midwest, are expected in the coming year, "along with a dynamic mapping characteristic and so users can explore regional variations in give-and-take usage and spoken communication patterns." That sounds pretty boot-donkey to me.
Source: https://slate.com/culture/2017/10/the-phrase-kick-ass-was-discovered-in-civil-war-correspondence.html
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