A dozen words for jerk
With his new satirical self-help title, author Martin Kihn counsels us to be more aggressive, and he took his own advice when titling the book: it’s called A$$hole: How I Got Rich and Happy by Not Giving a Damn About Anyone and How You Can Too (Broadway/Random House).
That hook has scored Kihn a Q&A in Newsweek, but apparently the magazine thinks its sensitive readers cannot withstand the word “asshole” unless it’s spelled with dollar signs. Whenever the a-word comes up in the interview, writer Brian Braiker substitutes a euphemism, such as “family-unfriendly word that NEWSWEEK generally avoids.”
To his credit, though, Baiker has some fun with it, using a different euphemism every time one is called for – which is often. Here’s the full list.
- aggressively un-nice person
- curse word synonymous with “unbelievable jerk” that begins with the letter A
- epithet that begins with the first letter of the alphabet
- buttocks personified
- human derrieres
- scatalogical body part
- a-hole
- rectal
- orifice
- disagreeable people
- excretory opening
- scatalogical body part
- posterior portal
- the word we have refrained from printing thus far in this interview
- begins with A, you figure it out
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