 Where does the word ass come from? Americans and British people both say ass, although the British word is a bit more like ass, but, you know, British people make an ass out where Americans make an ass sound a lot. You know, bath, bath, laugh, loft, grass, grass. But that doesn't explain why the British spell it differently. I mean, I guess it does make sense for them to spell it arse, because British people do drop the arse in words a lot. That's what makes English English a non-Rodic accent. They say cot instead of cart, potty instead of party, and naturally, instead of arse. But Americans say cart and party with an R, so then why don't we say arse? What's going on here? Okay, let's go back to the beginning. A thousand years ago, the Anglo-Saxons had a word that was something like arse, which referred to butts. It wound up being spelled like this in England, and in pronunciation they dropped the R after the vowel, like normal, and started pronouncing it arse. In American English, what would have normally happened was we would have kept pronouncing it arse, but instead something else happened. America went through its own sound change where we lost the R sound, but this sound change was much more limited both in scope and prevalence. For one thing, we only started dropping R's where they occurred immediately before an S sound, and for another thing, this sound change didn't affect everyone. By the early 1900s, this change was pretty widespread among rural farmers out in the countryside, but people in cities were still pronouncing their R's just like before. It's when all of the farmers started moving into the cities about 100 years ago that things got interesting. Sometimes all of the farmers moving in would just learn the city pronunciation, so they stopped saying horse and started saying horse. Sometimes though, they kept both words, and the two developed different meanings, effectively adding a new word to our vocabulary. This is how we have the words curse and cuss, burst, and bust, words that originally meant the same thing, but now mean slightly different things. And finally, for some words, the rural pronunciation took over completely. That's what happened with ass, and it makes sense that it would happen with this word in particular. A lot of the time, people who had just gotten to the cities from the farms would consciously try to pick up the city pronunciation in order to fit in. And one of the ways they'd remember that there should be an R in these words is because they kept seeing it everywhere in print. But for a long time, no one ever wrote down the word arse. It was a dirty word. Newspapers would censor it, so because the written word arse was never there to tip people off that there should be an R sound there, they wound up just sticking with the old rural pronunciation. Besides, if you're saying ass a lot, you're probably not in a situation where you're trying to impress everyone. Do you know about a word or group of words that have interesting histories? Let me know in the comments, and I'll see you next time.