Namely “stick it up your ass,” or variations thereof, such as “stick it where the sun don’t shine” or “you know where to stick this?”
There is an anecdote about my father that takes place in the mid-1950s where the final punchline is that he received this instruction from a rather unexpected source.
I have to wonder if that last bit is untrue because it sounds like something people wouldn’t have said back then. Then again, a lot of expressions go back waaaay farther than we might expect, so it’s entirely possible King George told his compadres that those upstart colonies could stick their Declaration of Independence between their merry olde buttockes.
Anybody know? Thanks.
ETA: I can’t ask him directly because he passed away in '04.
I remember my father saying, in the mid 50’s (he wasn’t given to vulgarity, obscenity or profanity)
Colmans Mustard, Colmans Starch
If you don’t like it…
You can stick it up your arse.
Can’t imagine where he heard it, or if he originated it (unlikely).
Fantastic! Thank you. I didn’t know about ngram viewer.
Here’s the anecdote (and yes, he regrets doing it)
Back when he was in high school, around 1955, he had a pretty young teacher. She had just learned to drive and had purchased her first car: a nifty new Volkswagen Beetle. They weren’t really common in the U.S. yet, and it became a bit of a conversation piece around the school.
My father and his friends decided it would be hilarious to play a little joke on her. They found a rusty old pipe, and put it under the car, so when she backed out, she would see it and think that it had fallen off her car. They expected she would be startled for a moment and then realize that the old rusty pipe could not possibly have fallen off her brand-new car.
But the ruse worked a little too well. She got terribly upset about it and took it straight to the mechanic. My father felt awful. They hadn’t meant to trick her for real!
As it turns out, she knew more about people than she did about cars. The next day, in class, she placed the rusty pipe on his desk, and said “I believe this belongs to you…and I think you know where you can put it.”
Is is wrong that I imagine this person saying, “Well, you have me there – I am no good, and my mother is, in fact, a bitch, but I have never even once sucked a cock!”?
A soldiers’ song to the tune of What A Friend We Have In Jesus
When this bloody war is over.
Oh, how happy I shall be!
When I get my civvy clothes on
No more soldiering for me.
No more church parades on Sunday
No more asking for a pass.
You can tell the Sergeant-Major
He can stick it up his arse.
There are many slightly different versions.
Well isn’t that the definition of a vulgarity–you can say it in private but not in public? I mean the f-word has been in use for a thousand years (and since the 15th century in print), and until recently you would never use it in a public setting.
I’m not sure what you’re getting at. Just because it’s a vulgarity doesn’t mean it’s been around forever.
The fact that the pretty young teacher actually said such a thing in a “public setting” is what makes the anecdote funny. (and of course she immediately became my father’s favorite teacher.)
John Stephen Farmer’s slang dictionaries from the 1890s, on Google Books, have a revealing look at Victorian vulgarity. “Slang and its Analogues, Past and Present.”
A search for “Arse” (very vulgar for the ‘posterior, breech, or fundament’) reveals some classic tidbits as:
“Barge Arse” - A man or woman of rotund development at the back
“Heavy Arse” - A hulking lazy fellow, a sluggard
“Arse upwards” In good luck
I.e. “Arsehole” and “hole” - the rectum
“Suck his (arse) hole” - A derisive retort upon an affirmative answer…
…and many more
If anything, our range of vulgarities has become narrower over the century!
This thread has been a nice refresher on the whole “stick it” motif and given me a new second favorite expletive (behind “sumbitch”). It’s a lot of fun to think of that peculiar commonality across time, where everyday people hundreds of years ago could look at some random jackass and say, “Yeah, stick it up your arse.”
‘Vaffanculo’ is ‘go do it in the arse’ (i.e. ‘go get fucked in the arse’) rather than ‘stick it [whatever ‘it’ may be in the specific conversation] up your arse’. It’s ‘Va’ a fare in culo’.
More likely it was rarely used in a polite public setting. As mentioned in the post below the use of such words was commonplace amongst the common people. I wonder if even amongst polite people it was often used, just not often recorded. Elizabethan plays are full of bawdy & scatalogical humour.
Yes, and some of these court testimonies are wonderfully coarse. Coincidentally I was watching an youtube video today which mention some of these testimonies. For instance an Elizabethan female defendant calling a citation against her a “shite-ation”. It’s not quite saying “up your arse” but it’s headed that way.