I can’t tell if this academic paper by a couple of professors at Georgetown and Stanford is supposed to be a serious, scholarly exercise on the etymological origins of “your ass” as a colloquial saying.

I’ve got a strong hint, though, that it’s all a big goof, based on passages like this one:

We discuss the problems your ass causes for various types of syntactic binding theories.

Plus, the Georgetown professor, John Beavers, comes off as more than a little goofy.

Note that a post out of this very blog was cited as a research source, on page 3 of the study. Unfortunately, the passage quoted — referencing Donny Deutsch’s “bad self”, aka “bad ass” — wasn’t scribbled by me; it was, in fact, a blockquote taken from some anonymous AP reporter.