Linguist Geoffrey Nunberg: Ascent of the A-Word.

Geoff Nunberg says that when he told people he was writing an entire book about "asshole," both the word and the cultural condition, they laughed. But he soldiered on and produced a revelatory work in the tradition of the great exploratory essayists. Tracing the history of one of our favorite put-downs, "Ascent of the A-Word: Assholism--the First Sixty Years" maps some of the most important currents in American society over the last century.