Way OT: Phrases you Hate 942

Elaine Parrish

When I first heard it (heard it in that usenet sort of way), it was used as Professor butthat to refer to a teacher at a university I was having trouble with. I started out wanting to like her and the course and ranted to my buddies at rec.pets.dogs.behavior when I couldn't make sense out of her random policies that had nothing to do with wanting to inspire or educate. She was putting the most interesting tidbits of information into her lectures and then not answering email when I politely (I'd never make a fool of her in front of the clbutt) ask for a primary source for the stuff that she'd obviously made up because she was contradicted in the Oxford English Dictionary, Sbreasth's Motif Index and common sense. (She said that there was evidence for the legendary King Arthur's real existence found from an inscribed wellstone that had been carbon dated to within 50 years of King Arthur's supposed existence.*)

The way I'm telling this now, I'm making it sound like she was a complete loon and I should have had nothing to do with her from the start, but I had such a sense of wanting to like and respect the teacher that I was having a hard time believing that she was as awful as she turned out to be. I kept thinking she'd just made small mistakes (anyone can stick their foot in their mouth now and then) and would be glad to have a student interested in the subject and good scholarship and the truth. It took me the longest time to come to the conclusions about her that I did.

All of that is painting the picture for the meaning of butthat. The online dictionaries say that it is calling someone an butthole, as someone who has their head stuck so far up their butt as to wear it as a hat. Now I'd call her an butthole, but at the time, I wanted something a little irreverent and insulting but not totally damning. I needed a word that was more funny than mean, something along the lines of calling someone a little stinker which isn't a compliment but isn't totally horrible either.

--Lia

*You need carbon for carbon dating. Stone doesn't have carbon. Even if it did, carbon dating would tell you when the stone was formed in geologic time, not when it was inscribed.