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True suffix?
Latest comment: 3 years ago5 comments4 people in discussion
My take on this is that it's closer to a true productive suffix, but the whole story is a bit more complex. See below. In any case -ass should be listed as a variant of -assed occurring in dialects where a final -d tends to become a glottal stop and -- my wild-assed guess here -- depending on which order the transformations happen in you either get -assed -> (-ass' ->) -ass or -assed -> -asst. I'm being free with terminology and notation here because it's been a good long while since I studied phonology in any formal way and I can only be bothered with proper IPA when it refers to beer.
Anyway, I would not count half-assed as an example here. Half-assed does not mean "really half" or such. It's more like half-baked Similarly jackass or wiseass in which ass means donkey (though I would suspect many people back-form these to fit the pattern). Some kosher examples that come to mind (including some on the page):
cheap-assed
crazy-assed
weird-assed
broke-assed
lame-assed
lazy-assed
ugly-assed
lying-assed
sorry-assed
I think the prototypical pattern here is to take some derogatory adjective and apply it to a person, with the person's ass standing in metonymically for the person. This is a well-known metonymy, as in "Get your ass over here," "Your ass is in trouble," etc. In fact, it's probably the noun form that's really prototypical, e.g., "Get your sorry ass over here." It's an easy step from "Get your sorry ass over here." to "You are one sorry-assed excuse for a ..." and so forth. In support of this, adjectives can pile up in either case: "Get your sorry, lying, ugly broke ass over here."; "You are one sorry, lying, ugly broke-assed excuse for a ...".
How to notate this in the form of dictionary entries is a bit problematic. "Adjective intensifier" doesn't seem quite right, but I'm not sure what would be better. --dmh06:06, 27 July 2010 (UTC)Reply
Thinking it over a bit more, after driving by a big-assed house, I'm still comfortable with my guess as to the origins, but -assed has definitely taken on an idiomatic life of its own. AFAICT, you can use X-assed where you can use seriously X with roughly the same meaning. E.g.,
a big-assed house
a purple-assed flower
some existential-assed philosopy
It still fits better with some adjectives than others. "A pretty-assed flower" sounds a bit odd, probably because the construction works better as criticism.
Note also that while you can substitute butt for ass in Get your ... ass over here. it doesn't work in You are one ...-assed excuse for a ...
I haven't studied grammar/phonology beyond high-school English class, but I can offer my opinion from an Ohio point-of-view. "-ass" means what the entry says it does. "-assed" is rarely used here, and would mean something different; using either suffix to make a noun sounds just wrong. (To me, a "big-ass woman" would be a very big woman, while a "big-assed woman" would be a woman with a big ass.) 99.177.172.10904:59, 18 August 2010 (UTC)Reply
I have and it depends on dialect. Definitely within mine the suffixes work exactly the way you describe and everything dmh typed in their second comment is completely off. The versions they wrote in their first work because they work metonymously with a person's actual ass. Any discussion of "big-assed houses" certainly seems like it just comes from misunderstanding/mishearing -ass (as a general or collegial term of disparagement) by people whose own dialects tend towards extremely soft terminals, but I take them at their word that they and others in their dialect process it as assed . — LlywelynII14:54, 22 January 2022 (UTC)Reply
