Compound intensifier of the week

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This is apparently from X in February of 2023, though it can now be found elsewhere:

So is ass an intensifier in "super mario level ass geological formation", or has it just been bleached into a formative for turning a phrase into a modifier?

In any case, you can learn about "Super Mario levels" here:

Levels (also known as stages or courses) are enemy and obstacle-filled romps where Mario and co. must run, jump and crouch to reach a Goal Pole. Each level is set in a specific world, which determines its theme and difficulty. Upon completing a level, it usually unlocks either another level or some sort of special building.

In Newer Super Mario Bros. Wii and Newer Super Mario Bros. Wii Plus, there are 128 total levels spanning 14 worlds, along with a few unused levels. Meanwhile, in Newer Super Mario Bros. DS, there are a total of 80 levels spanning 8 worlds.

And you can learn about Lítla Dímun here (which is also apparently the source of the picture):

Lítla Dímun is the smallest of the Faroe Islands’ 18 main islands. But though it may be tiny, the islet still has the power to influence the atmosphere.

A lenticular cloud often drapes over it like a wet, vapory blanket. These stationary clouds typically form over mountain peaks or other protruding landmasses. Lítla Dímun’s lenticular hovers above its top, occasionally spilling down over the verdant land as it reaches toward the cold sea.

I'm pretty sure that lítla means "little".  As far as I can tell, Dímun is just a proper name, but someone may be able to tell us differently in the comments.

As for ass-morphology, we can start with the well-known xkcd take:

..and we follow up with some (semi-) relevant past posts:

"New intensifiers", 8/16/2004
"The intensified crack of dawn", 6/7/2005
"Is is a prosodic-ass constraint?", 8/25/2011
"Can "[adjective]-ass" occur predicatively?", 11/18/2013
"Ignoble-ass citation practices", 11/12/2014
"A productive-ass suffix", 1/29/2018

Update — a note from Joan Maling, sent by email since I originally neglected to allow comments on this post:

Prof. Dr. Google turned up this info:

Linguists inform us that the name Dímun is Celtic in its origins. The first syllable, dí or di, means two, while the second syllable, mun, comes from the Celtic muinn, which means a hump, a ridge or a hill. In other words, Dímun means two humps, ridges or hills.

FWIW, Iceland has two similar place names: StóraDímon and Litla–Dímon, two small tuff mountains, 347 m and 380 m high respectively.  Stóra means big; Litla means little.

Dr. Thórhallur (Tolli) Eythórsson agrees about the Celtic origins of 2nd half of these place names:

já ég er sammála! Þessi nöfn, bæði í Færeyjum og á Íslandi, eru líklega af keltneskum uppruna ('Two hills'). Helgi Guðmundsson talar um þau í bókinni sinni, Um haf innan.

[Helgi's 1997 book is reviewed here.]

I asked Tolli about Stóri Dímon, an excellent Icelandic blue cheese, where Stóri is masculine rather than the feminine Stóra in the place name.

Tolli added: "There seems to be some fluctuation between feminine and masculine in the place names. Maybe the masculine is more common now (I think I had to be told that the "correct" form is feminine), and that may explain why the cheese is masculine, although it may also be because ostur is masculine! [ostur = cheese]



25 Comments

  1. Victor Mair said,

    October 20, 2024 @ 7:47 pm

    That circular cloud hovering over Litla Dimun looks almost exactly like the one I described resting atop Mt. Hood in this comment earlier today.

  2. Rick Rubenstein said,

    October 21, 2024 @ 2:28 am

    Off-topic, but it's strange to look back at xkcds from the early, fully-hand-drawn era.

  3. Chas Belov said,

    October 21, 2024 @ 2:35 am

    I'm sure I've been hearing "big-ass" for much of my long life, but that's the first time I've seen it in such a big-ass string of modifiers.

  4. Andreas Johansson said,

    October 21, 2024 @ 2:44 am

    "Dímun" apparently means "double-peaked", acc'd this paper:

    https://www.ssns.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/Gammeltoft_2004_Vol_38_pp_31_50.pdf

  5. J.W. Brewer said,

    October 21, 2024 @ 5:35 am

    Is there a sociolinguistics fieldworker consensus yet on the extent if any to which pseudonymous tweets are good evidence of current usage in some demographically-describable "offline" language community?

  6. Chris M. said,

    October 21, 2024 @ 10:31 am

    I thought maybe they meant to type "as".

  7. SusanC said,

    October 21, 2024 @ 11:14 am

    On fark.com, a zoo animal will almost invariably be described as ugly-ass .

  8. Daniel Barkalow said,

    October 21, 2024 @ 11:34 am

    I suspect the "ass" is in that description primarily to disrupt the possibility that "level" is serving a connective function rather than being part of the thing being compared to. A "star wars level spaceship" would be a spaceship the size of a moon or something like that, so a "super mario level island" might mean that the island is equal in some way to an island in Super Mario, so people would get stuck trying to think of a quantifiable way in which islands in Super Mario are extreme.

  9. Laurentio said,

    October 21, 2024 @ 11:47 am

    Lítla Dímun: A very thorough discussion of the name is found here: Gammeltoft, Peder 2004: 'Among Dímons and Papeys: What kind of contact do the names really point to?' Northern Studies : The Journal of the Scottish Society for Northern Studies, nr. 38, s. 31-49 (https://www.ssns.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/Gammeltoft_2004_Vol_38_pp_31_50.pdf)

  10. Mike Grubb said,

    October 21, 2024 @ 11:54 am

    I think Chris M. is probably right. Although I'm familiar with -ass being used with substantive words, as in candy-ass and punk-ass, I think Super-Mario-level-ass is a bit too much of a stretch.

  11. Laurentio said,

    October 21, 2024 @ 12:03 pm

    The point is, the Lítla (small) is matched by its twin, the Stóra (big) Dímon; and the linguistic argument is that Dímon is a Gaelic loan word that (old) Norse speakers used to name pairs of peaks in various locations across the North Atlantic region.

  12. Bookie said,

    October 21, 2024 @ 12:39 pm

    As someone who's maybe younger than most of the commentariat, I say with confidence that the OP absolutely meant "ass," not "as." It makes perfect sense.

    Ass used in this case is a sort of derogatory modifier to the adjectival phrase. It's a Super Mario looking island, and that's F'ed up and weird. The negative connotation is meant is a playful, facetious way.

  13. RfP said,

    October 21, 2024 @ 1:52 pm

    @JW

    Is there a sociolinguistics fieldworker consensus yet on the extent if any to which pseudonymous tweets are good evidence of current usage in some demographically-describable "offline" language community?

    This is a complex and fascinating question!

    I’m apparently on the other end of the age continuum from Bookie, and I’m not a gamer, by any means. So we probably don’t fit within any kind of offline demographic in the way you’re using the term. And yet I understood the usage immediately.

    How do online and offline contexts affect each other?

    Does anybody truly live “IRL” anymore? (Or, more specifically, to what extent does anyone truly live “IRL” anymore?)

    Sociolinguists, we have questions!

  14. HS said,

    October 21, 2024 @ 6:57 pm

    Fascinating!  Here in New Zealand an "adjective-as" expression is completely ubiquitous – you hear it everywhere, including on public radio, and it is understood and I think considered perfectly normal, if perhaps somewhat informal, by virtually everyone.  ("I went for a swim but the water was cold as." "His family is rich as." "My mountain-bike ride took me much longer than I expected because the track was rough as.") "This is probably the feature of New Zealand English most commented on by overseas visitors (after our shifted vowels). I think of it as the "sweet as" construction, after what is probably its most common occurrence, the expression "sweet as", which can be an exclamation ("Sweet as!", meaning "cool!" or "great!") or a kind of confirmation ("sweet as", meaning more or less "that's fine with me"). 

    I thought this construction was unique to New Zealand and I had assumed it must have originally arisen as a kind of incomplete comparison or elided simile ("the water was cold as ice" –> "the water was cold as").  Or perhaps more plausibly, I thought it may have arisen from the elision of "fuck" ("his family is rich as fuck" –> "his family is rich as"), in which case it would have arisen as a euphemism (or perhaps as a kind of semi-humorous way of having your cake and eating it too – saying "as fuck" without actually saying "fuck". Though if it did arise this way, there is no trace of this as it is used in New Zealand English today – it is considered informal but not impolite.)
     
    However it arose, in modern New Zealand English it has I think become – functionally, rhythmically, and syntactically – a kind of emphasiser tag (or tag emphasiser) more or less equivalent to something like "big time" (or perhaps in this Trumpian age that should be "bigly"…). So "his family is rich as" (which is pronounced with a distinct stress on the "as") means pretty much the same as "his family is rich, big time".
       
    I am familiar with the American "-ass" idiom, in phrases such as "bad-ass", but I simply never connected it with the New Zealand "-as" idiom until I read this post!  In particular, that cartoon with the "sweet-ass" car was like a blinding flash of light to me – replace the "-ass" with "as" and it could have come straight out of New Zealand!  I guess the reason it never occurred to me that there might be a connection is because in New Zealand, as in the UK, we write "arse", not "ass", and we pronounce it quite different from the American pronunciation of "ass" and nothing at all like "as".

    After reading this post, and a few of the linked previous posts, it now seems quite plausible to me that the New Zealand "sweet as" construction may in fact have arisen from a mishearing and misunderstanding of the American "-ass" construction, where the "ass" has been misunderstood and reanalysed as the comparison "as".

  15. JPL said,

    October 22, 2024 @ 1:00 am

    @HS:

    Or vice versa, as they say.

  16. Jonathan Smith said,

    October 22, 2024 @ 1:05 pm

    @HS Hm your original idea of elision seems better — one parallel case I know is Taiwanese where e.g. adj. + kah + extent (with kah diachronically from kau3 'up until') can become just adj. + kah, meaning 'a lot' without specification as in NZ English.

    (plus kah in the 2nd version seems to retain its running/sandhi tone despite phrase-final position? maybe the more knowledgeable will correct/confirm)

  17. KevinM said,

    October 25, 2024 @ 12:49 pm

    Who can forget OJ saying he would never wear those Bruno Magli ugly-ass shoes? Or, as xkcd would have it, ugly ass-shoes. (Is that what they call underwear in Germany?)

  18. Stan Carey said,

    October 27, 2024 @ 4:23 am

    From Bluesky, a linguistic note on the line: "This is the most 'two dudes in a cow costume' ass cow I’ve ever seen in my life."
    https://bsky.app/profile/kilinguistics.bsky.social/post/3kollrlv3t32r

  19. Mark Liberman said,

    October 27, 2024 @ 7:21 am

    @Stan Carey:

    The comment, for those without a Bluesky account:

    "ass" in English is now an attributive linker that can cliticise to arbitrary phrases to derive an attribute and I think that is beautiful.

    This agrees with my suggestion that ass "been bleached into a formative for turning a phrase into a modifier"…

  20. Stan Carey said,

    October 27, 2024 @ 12:37 pm

    Thanks, Mark. I assumed that posts from non-private Bluesky accounts would be publicly visible, but that may not be so, and I should have provided more detail.

    The comment you've quoted is from Kilu von Prince, a linguist at Heinrich Heine University in Düsseldorf, and the "'two dudes in a cow costume' ass cow" line is from Drew Schnoebelen at Penguin Random House.

  21. Cedar said,

    October 27, 2024 @ 1:38 pm

    1. I agree with Bookie, in that to me (as millennial) that the usage "ass" here points out the cuteness of the "being a jerk" sense which someone would make an island and cloud look like that, as if intentionally making Mario art.

    2. A recent film in the indie cinema was titled "My Old Ass", which was a bit odd. The title could just have well been "My Old Self" (significantly losing cheekiness). Different usage, but same word fondness?

  22. RfP said,

    November 1, 2024 @ 4:26 pm

    @Cedar

    "My Old Ass" is not only a really good movie, but the title is apt—or "perfectly cromulent," as the old folks say.

  23. bookie said,

    November 2, 2024 @ 12:26 am

    Here's another "ass turning a phrase into a modifier example"

    In it the speaker is basically declaring that a player misused an ability that is supposed to be aggressive and lethal in a scared and ineffective way because he was afraid of his opponent.

    https://youtu.be/rS_WVfHeq14?si=oLHJXgxFBGPs-Xxc&t=1512

    Lenny knew he was cooked, and once hit hit this "don't take another step closer" ass pulse bomb, we all did as well.

  24. Michael Watts said,

    November 19, 2024 @ 10:07 pm

    The comment, for those without a Bluesky account:

    "ass" in English is now an attributive linker that can cliticise to arbitrary phrases to derive an attribute and I think that is beautiful.

    This agrees with my suggestion that ass "been bleached into a formative for turning a phrase into a modifier"…

    True, but it seems unnecessary. Arbitrary phrases already zero-derive into attributes, and this is incredibly common. There would be nothing unusual about saying "This is the most 'two dudes in a cow costume' cow I've seen in my life."

  25. Michael Watts said,

    November 19, 2024 @ 11:25 pm

    For that reason, I still see an emphatic sense in the construction.

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