That happened rather recently. The first literary attestation of asshole is in Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead: “Lieutenant (sg) Dove, USNR. A Cornell man, a Deke, a perfect asshole.” Yet at the same time Orville Prescott, reviewing the book in the New York Times, could still sniff in reference to the book’s obscene language: “It is probably truthful reporting, but it is unnecessarily offensive and marvelously tiresome.” In 1950, The Catcher in the Rye’s Holden Caulfield, for all of his contempt for “phonies,” said goddam and hell but never fuck up, No shit or asshole; Nunberg points out that “adolescent boys didn’t yet talk that way.”

Nunberg argues that asshole became a true part of the language after the 1960s, as class identification came to focus less on economics than culture. When even the affluent came to reject elite manners and diction as antithetical to authenticity, it became a signature societal gaffe to imply that one was more entitled than others were. The very essence of the asshole is his implication that one is allowed to break the rules despite inconveniencing others. Nunberg uses new text-searching technology to show that the term sense of entitlement exploded in usage just as asshole did, in the 1970s.

But Nunberg’s idea that the explosion of the word asshole means that there is more “assholism” is shakier. Nunberg argues that the transgressions of characters termed cads and bounders in Dickens and Austen, or heels in old songs and movies, were not those of the asshole per se. We see Mr. Darcy as an asshole for expecting Elizabeth Bennett to be thankful for his marrying someone below his class level, whereas Austen contemporaries fully sympathized, but looked down instead on Darcy’s self-congratulation.

But we could also say that societies differ over time in what qualifies as being, generally, a jerk. Today we most revile the person with a sense of entitlement and have a name for him. Two hundred years ago, the same brain centers lit up in people against the man who was too openly self-congratulatory, and there were names for him. But does this mean that there were also fewer people among them with the same sense of entitlement that rankles us? More likely it is that our sensibility makes us find that kind of person especially annoying. That, in itself, is a neat argument, but the corollary that there has been an actual “advent of the asshole” seems sensational.

Nunberg considers it to be further evidence that our political discourse has become so shrill. However, do the taunting animadversions of Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck flow from a sense of entitlement over the rest of society, or over one target of scorn, the left? If it’s the latter, then we are faced not with a general sense of immunity from society-wide norms of decorum, but with a specifically targeted incivility—indeed different from assholism as Nunberg specifies earlier. Or, how are bloggers, or op-ed writers, being presumptuous towards society as whole—i.e. assholes—with a tone enjoyed by even the mildest-mannered of souls over morning coffee? Were writers like Ambrose Bierce and H.L. Mencken, fond of the same tone, “assholes”—or even heels, cads, or bounders? To designate being snarky as being an asshole would apply the latter term with what most would consider too wide a brush under any definition.