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Last summer when Miss Poubelle was in Scotland, she picked up a safe-sex guide at a gay bookstore and was amused to read "You may want to wash your arse before being rimmed, but douching is not a good idea. It will just bring more germs out into the open around your arse." Right away, her mind turned to tongues.

Not tongues probing arses, but to the odd little differences in the tongue that we in North America share with the British. For the language of the safe-sex guide was a clear reminder of the contrast between our ever divergent dialects of English. Here in North America, of course, we do not say arse; we say ass. In Britain, the situation is quite different-- arse is the normal word, and ass is what Americans say.

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A bit of research makes it clear that the Brits have the older form of the word. Ars or ers was the normal, ordinary way to refer to the buttocks in Old English and Middle English. The word appears in Chaucer and other early works with no particular hesitancy. It is also closely related to words for the buttocks in other Germanic languages, such as German Arsch.

Around the late 17th century, arse began to be consider a vulgar word, and an epidemic of dashes broke out-- since the word was too impolite to print in full, it usually showed up as "a" or "a-- e." A common word for penis at the time was tarse, and by a happy coincidence, this rhymes with arse, so we get a lot of bad doggerel that exploits this fact. Miss Poubelle was amused by the following verses from 1731:

I have had a Cl-p / By a sad mishap, / G-d dn her A-se / That fir'd my t-rse

(Roughly translated: I got gonorrhea by a sad mishap, God damn her ass that set my dick on fire.)

But even earlier that this, there was a dialect pronunciation of arse that dropped the r, so that the word sounded like ass. (And here Miss Poubelle is indebted to Rawson's Dictionary of Euphemisms and other Doubletalk for a very helpful discussion of the arse/ass connection.) Shakespeare must have had the two pronunciations in mind in his play A Midsummer Night's Dream (1594), when he names a character Bottom and Bottom turns into an ass.

We can also guess at pronunciation from the way writers rhymed the word. One 18th century British poetaster penned the followed lines:

And because she denied him a shove on the grass/ It's as good as his word he got flames to her ass.

From this, it's a pretty fair bet that the ass pronunciation was well known in Britain at that time. One more joke from the 1730s makes the same point: in this joke, a salesman convinces a customer that a saddle ought be called a mule 'because it's something between a horse and an ass.' Arse/ass is not the only pair with this kind of alternation; at one time it seems that it was common to drop r's before the s sound, as in horse/hoss, curse/cuss, burst/bust.

Eventually the ass pronunciation won out over the older arse in North America, and now arse seems funny and archaic to us. Sexual vocabulary is deeply conservative-- we don't like using new words for our favorite things, and I doubt that many gay American men will want to start talking about their arses. But it is not too hard to imagine that coming from a sturdy English lad, one could find the word rather hot. It's one of those little linguistic differences that makes the world more interesting. If you get a chance to visit Britain soon, Miss Poubelle wishes you happy arse-hunting. And tell them Blanche said 'hullo'.