作家、語言學家吉奧夫萊南博爾格在他的新書裏介紹了Asshole （混賬王八蛋、混蛋）一詞的淵源和“應用標準”，詼諧有趣。同時，這也是一本辨別好歹、認識真假的“課外書”。
Assholism
My new book is called Ascent of the A-Word: Assholism, The First Sixty Years . But I should qualify that subtitle. It's true that the epithet ***** was first coined by WWII GI's--its first use to describe a literary character was in Norman Mailer's 1948 war novel The Naked and the Dead. But it really wasn't until 1970s that it came of age as a category of our collective moral life, ubiquitous everywhere: in country and western and rock, in movies from Dirty Harry to Annie Hall to Animal House, the plays of Neil Simon and the novels of Rita Mae Brown.
Along the way, the ***** became a focus of collective fascination for us, just as the phony was for Holden Caulfield and the cad was for Anthony Trollope. Year after year, *****s make up from four to six of Barbara Walters' lists of the 10 most fascinating people, a disproportionate number even for the celebrity classes.
People tend to think of words like "*****" as little more than explosions of emotional steam. Even the Oxford English Dictionary defines it summarily as "someone foolish or contemptible," which gives it an awful lot of leeway. But the vulgarity of a word doesn't necessarily make it imprecise or less deserving of careful usage. In fact ***** carves out a rather specific territory.
You can be an ***** for cheating on your wife or girlfriend, but not for cheating on your expense reports or a final exam. You can be an ***** for taking credit for a colleague's work, but probably not for plagiarizing from someone else's book. And George W. Bush wouldn't have qualified as an ***** for anything he said about WMD's, though he might have earned the label for his press-conference smirks.
What makes somebody an ***** isn't simply a sense of entitlement, but a kind of obtuseness--about his own importance, the difference between who he is and what he does, the needs of others and the way he is perceived by them. And yes, *****s are usually male.
But there are *****s and *****s, depending on how that obtuse self-delusion expresses itself. Here, then, is a kind of ***** aviary. Don't think of it as one of those lists of "ten biggest *****s" that the Web is brimming with. Top ten lists always efface distinctions. Comparing *****s on a single scale of magnitude is apt to lead you to focus on a person's cruelty and the injury he inflicts, which confuses the ***** with the prick.
The real measure of someone's assholism is the breadth of his self-delusion, the discrepancy between his perceptions and the reality before his eyes, the energy of his denials and rationalizations. That's why you find a more perfect personification of the ***** in Ricky Gervais' David Brent in The Office than in Mr. Blonde from Reservoir Dogs, or in Malvolio in Twelfth Night than in Iago in Othello.
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