Exactly. Not so much that it was commonly substituted for “asshole” and other crude terms, but obscure? No way.
Invisible Wombat, what about derivatives of it, such as “anal” (as in anal retentive)?
I hate to intrude on this cultural badinage, but the strip was funny even before the last line.
I hear “anal” all the time, as in “he’s suffering an anal-cranial inversion” or “don’t be so anal.”
Of course, anus is just the Latin word for “ring.”
(Those wacky Romans and their notions of anatomy…)
That’s a source of endless juvenile amusement whenever I see another one of those creepy commercials for the wedding-ring warehouse stores: “Show your love with a golden anus.” Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings in Spanish is “El Señor de los Anillos,” literally “The Lord of the Little Anuses.”
And don’t get me started about vanilla…
And how you gonna rhyme “Young black and famous” without using the words “Wit’ money hanging out the anus?”
Yes thet are!
Personally, when I have cause to refer to the third gas giant from the Sun, I pronounce it according to the Latin rules, which comes out something like (in English orthography) “OO-ron-oos”. This avoids both the “your anus” and “urine us” pronounciations.
Screwy thing about working for a state agency here in Austin, Texas:
Austin rarely gets very cold in the winter, and never stays very cold for long. On the other hand, summers are hot as hell, so stte office buildings tend to turn up the air conditioning full blast, to the point where a lot of people inside are freezing!
So, at the building where I work, it’s not at all unusual to see people wearing sweaters or using space heaters when it’s 105 degrees Fahrenheit outside!
Right. To me, the punchline was in the second panel, but it would have been jarring to stop there.
But no one knows what your refering to, so you end up saying “your-anus” anyway, right?
Gas giant! Now you have unleashed the third grader in me!
Really, though are ya iddin’ me with this? :dubious:
And I agree, the joke is funny in the second panel. The anus humor is just an added bonus (pronounced BAHN-ooos )
This all goes to show why Herschel should have been allowed to call it “George”.
So,** InvisibleWombat**, would you care to share with us the how, why, where, and when you heard ‘anus’ used by a law-enforcement professional? I’m sure there’s an interesting story here!
Well, usually, when I’m talking about Uranus, I’m also talking about Saturn, Neptune, and/or Jupiter, so that usually clears up the context. And I referred to it as “the third gas giant” rather than as “the seventh planet” because “planet” is a hodge-podge mess of a category, containing three very different sorts of objects (rocky planets like Earth and Mars, gas giants like Uranus and Jupiter, and large Kuiper belt objects like Pluto and Xena). Uranus is arguably more like the Sun than it is like Earth or Xena.
That was exactly my reaction and what tickled me so much about the strip in the first place. Alice snookered the PHB in the second panel; the last one was just a bonus “let’s see how far I can push this one” on her part. 
Not particularly. He was describing a rape.
Professor: I’m sorry, Fry, but astronomers renamed Uranus in 2620 to end that stupid joke once and for all.
Fry: Oh. What’s it called now?
Professor: Urectum.