It's pretty much universal. Etymologists and lexicographers know that most words were in use for some time before being written -- anywhere from years to centuries. They try to make inferences by other means, as best they can.

They gradually expand the corpus they can search. A lot of words that are attributed to Shakespeare are gradually finding earlier sources, often in manuscripts. They knew all along that Shakespeare wasn't the first person to use a word (a common myth), but that his works were widely printed and thus survived.

Those manuscripts still don't include spoken usages, and show only the use by the class of people who could write. But it is solid data, before they go off into more tenuous hypotheses.

Can you post the clip somewhere? That would be interesting, and apparently of historical significance!

> I always wonder how many words have an etymology which predates written use significantly due to the "class" of people who use that word

I studied a bit of Shakespeare at university, and my awesome lecturer (https://researchers.uq.edu.au/researcher/619) was always very clear to note that for many phrases "Shakespeare was the first to write it down", which is quite different to "Shakespeare made up this phrase / word".

To your point, he of course was attempting to write for a variety of classes, including the illiterate (his plays weren't written to be published, that only happened after his death - they were ephemera to be performed and witnessed). His success may very well have come from using many phrases that the "lower class" would have recognised from use not just inference.

There are certainly academics who collect and study spoken language corpora, not just written - it’s very much a matter of what gets collected and catalogued though. The fact that early citations here are from Usenet speaks to the availability and search ability of that corpus much more than to its role in the origination of written speech. Transcripts of IRC and MUDs and aim chats are not collected and indexed, so they don’t get referenced.

Similarly with spoken corpora it tends to be things like interviews with old people created to preserve dialect recordings, or material from local radio news - rather than random conversations among young people.

I guess by virtue of ‘tape in the studio just kept rolling’ there might be rather more recorded examples of band members chatting away over the years than of other similar aged groups.

Yeah, it made its way into my quiver by hanging around slashdot for years.

I’ve always taken it had being derived from this 1976 movie line: https://movie-sounds.org/western-movie-quotes/quotes-with-so...

If I had to guess: it is a version of asshole you might be able to say in front of your mother.

I first encountered "asshat" in the context of network security: there are white hats, who are motivated by ethics and social responsibility. There are black hats, who are motivated by personal gain and seem to lack a sense of morality. Then there are asshats, who don't care about anything other than amusing themselves at other people's expense.

I have absolutely no idea of this is the origin of the term, or if it just fit there perfectly.

I can remember "asshat" being used among punks, goths, metalheads, hackers, etc during the 90s; for sure. At least, in Southern California.

The examples in the article were older and from a different community.

Confirmed by OP:

https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/what-does-assc...

nah Office resonates because it MIRRORED real life en vérité, not the other way around. That's always been Mike Judge's strength, casting the actual as fantastic as it really is for better or often worse.

we were saying assclown or azzclown before the movie but it hit so sweetly thus

I always thought of it as separated by a slash.

Ass/clown.

Etymology can be complicated...

As a French, I have another explanation. The french equivalent to a "dunce cap" is "bonnet d'âne". "bonnet" means "cap" and "âne" means "donkey", so "bonnet d'âne" literally translates into "asshat".

It is probably not the true origin of the word, but it is not impossible either. Also, words can have several origins.

A minor issue with that reasoning is that it doesn't explain why you might use the word asshat to refer to a person who is wearing an asshat. Asshatter would make a bit more sense, akin to brownnoser. On the other hand, I guess words like fatass have this same problem of equating the person with something the person possesses.

I had always assumed, based on nothing, that "asshat" was originally a type of hacker... neither black-hat nor white-hat, but merely ass-hat

This is where I first heard it as well. I remember that it stuck out as being novel in terms of crass humor, but according to the article the term predated it by several years at that point. Makes you wonder about what obscure new words are being used right now that you won't hear for another decade.

In my memory you had to craft it from two half-asses, but it looks like they were really called bum cheeks.

I remember first encountering the term on b3ta around the same time.

‘Unfriend’ is another one.

> (…) though I remember it had to do with graffiti and was popularized by rather than created on Usenet

That one’s probably king as a verb (“kinging New York”).

I'm doing my part! I use "plonk" once or twice a day, which is probably more than the average person.

Well, as noted in the article, asshead has a few hundred years on asshat...

In Kiwi (New Zealand) slang we often add "as" to adjectives, like "sweet as" or "good as" to mean "no problem!" or similar ... without something after the "as" to compare it to (kind of like "good as gold" but without the word "gold"). Anyway, my Kiwi friend (a guy) studied in the U.S. for a while, and once he held open the door for a girl, and she said, "Thanks!" He called after her in chirpy Kiwi slang, "sweet as!" She heard, "Sweet ass!" and was not impressed! After a moment he realized what she'd heard and tried to explain, I'm not sure whether she believed him or not. :-)

37? I can't believe it was that long ago. (Didn't even click your link, I know what it is :)

That’s my recollection as well. It spread to the forums, and like so many other terrible things spawned by that site, metastasized into the Internet.