Tonight in the Commonwealth Club's Blue Room, UC Berkeley Linguistics professor Geoffrey Nunberg will give a talk on the "Ascent of the A-Word" from its roots with GIs in World War II, up to it's widespread usage in everything from blog posts to Woody Allen movies to that one time Dubya Bush accidentally let it slip during a press conference.
Nunberg, who literally wrote a book on the word Asshole, will (ahem) "take us behind" the slur so we can get to know the word that has "become an expression of contemporary American values - about civility, about relationships, about pretension, about class." The professor will presented on stage in conversation with moderator/Stanford professor Robert Sutton — himself an expert in assholes, having recently published The No Asshole Rule.
Tickets are $20 or $7 for adults, and the (w)hole thing happens tonight at 6 p.m. at the Commonwealth Club at Market and 2nd Street.
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