Kissing the proverbial you know what

and the vulgar slang idiom (with the M[ass] Sg object noun ass):

kiss someone’s ass or: kiss ass

In any case, Phang chose to indicate that she was using a formulaic expression, via the formula-signaling adjective proverbial modifying the head noun of the object. She said kiss the proverbial X and not kiss proverbial X, and that would seem to indicate that she was using the elevated idiom (with ring), which comes with a definite article, and not the vulgar idiom (with ass), which is anarthrous: kiss the ring, kiss the proverbial ring; kiss ass, kiss proverbial ass.

But we can feel pretty sure that she was aiming for the vulgar idiom, because she also used a scheme for avoiding taboo words (like ass ‘buttocks’ or ‘anus’): the filler you know what replacing the taboo item (I’m not going to kiss (his) you know what, He told me to stick it up my you know what).

The result is that at first glance she just looks confused, mixing features of the two competitors for a submission idiom. But it turns out that the syntax of formula-signaling proverbial is more complex than I had thought, and she was saying exactly what she intended.

This posting is primarily about some English lexical items, their semantics, pragmatics, and syntax. But Phang’s interview with Steele, and Chapman’s Raw Story piece about it, are also, in part, about linguistic matters, about the use of racist tropes with a poisonous history while disavowing that history, mendaciously claiming them to be simple observations about current events, or mere hyperbole for effect, or even just joking — all re-framings of Grabpussy’s actual speeches. So at the end of this posting I’ll append the entire remaining part of Chapman’s story, after the initial bit I quoted above.

Lexicography 1: the idioms of submission. From the Wiktionary site, which lists the two idioms with possessive determiners in their objects, though both idioms have non-possessive alternative forms. First:

idiom kiss someone’s ring [or: kiss the ring]: To give respect or reverence to someone; to express servitude to someone. Etymology: An allusion to a traditional manner of expressing obedience to a [Catholic] bishop (especially the pope) or king.

The non-possessive variant of this idiom is in fact understood as possessed, with the possessor determined from context; and occurrences of the variant with the definite article regularly have the possessor explicitly expressed, just in an of-possessive phrase rather than in an inflectional possessive as determiner. Both these points are illustrated in a news report of what is currently my country’s most celebrated figurative ring-kissing (no actual rings were kissed, but shitloads of servility were conveyed) — with the possessor implicit in the headline of the report, and then with the possessor explicit in the story, but in an of-possessive phrase. On the MSNBC site, “Why it matters that McCarthy went to Mar-a-Lago to kiss the ring” by Steve Benen on 1/29/21:

idiom kiss someone’s ass [or: kiss ass]: (slang) To flatter someone (especially a superior) in an obsequious manner, and to support their every opinion to gain their favor. Etymology: Said because the ass is considered vulgar and being willing to kiss another’s is considered a sign of submission and patronage.

Given the ambiguity of ass, this idiom is interpretable as kissing the buttocks or (much more offensively) as kissing the anus.

Related to this idiom are the nouns  asskisser, asslick(er), brownnose(r) ‘syncophant, suck-up’.

Lexicography 2: the meta-lexicon. Expressions that comment on the status of other expressions in the text. The formula-signaling adjective proverbial; and the filler you know who / you-know-who avoiding the explicit expression of uncomfortable shared knowledge, especially a taboo item known to to both speaker and addressee. From NOAD:

adj. proverbial: [a] (of a word or phrase) referred to in a proverb or idiom [or any well-known formulaic expression]: I’m going to stick out like the proverbial sore thumb. [b] well known, especially so as to be stereotypical: the Welsh people, whose hospitality is proverbial.

noun you-know-what: informal used to refer to something known to the hearer without naming or specifying it: I think he’s probably covering his you-know-what, because he knows he made an illegal turn.

Not to devalue schemes of taboo avoidance, but Katie Phang’s you know what looks pretty straightforward to me, while the way she used formula-signaling proverbial caused me to write, “at first glance she just looks confused, mixing features of the two competitors for a submission idiom”.

The first, easy, thing to say about this proverbial is that it can simply be slotted in as a prenominal adjective, before any ordinary prenominal modifiers:

be sick as a dog > be sick as a proverbial dog (C Sg head noun dog)

stick out like a sore thumb > stick out like proverbial sore thumb (C Sg head noun thumb)

breed like bunnies > breed like proverbial bunnies (C Pl head noun bunnies)

stick out like sore thumbs > stick out like proverbial sore thumbs (C Pl head noun thumbs)

kiss ass > kiss proverbial ass (M (Sg) head noun ass)

be hot shit > be proverbial hot shit (M (Sg) head noun shit)

The second, more complicated, thing to say about proverbial X is that it refers to ‘the X as in the proverb / idiom / formula’, so that many speakers are inclined to see the idiom not as mere proverbial, but as the proverbial, with the definite article the built in. (Conveniently for this view, the is compatible with C Sg, C Pl, and M (Sg) head nouns.) This gives us variants like

stick out like the proverbial sore thumb (C Sg), stick out like the proverbial sore thumbs (C Pl), and kiss the proverbial ass (M (Sg))

The first of these appears, without comment or explanation, in NOAD‘s example for formula-signaling proverbial (where you might well have expected stick out like a proverbial sore thumb). And the last is what Katie Phang was taboo-avoiding in kissing the proverbial you know what (where you might well have expected kissing proverbial you know what). So: not a confusion, but a slightly different (and very widespread) form for the idiom.

Addendum: the remainder of the Raw Story piece.

“Well, that is a critical point here because they have to rationalize their own role in all of this,” said Steele. “When it all comes to this conversation where you have the leading candidate for the Republican Party telling Americans he is going to be retribution for Americans who agree with him, he’s going to be the guy who’s going to go fight and take people out, that immigrants and others come into this country, whether from Africa or from other parts of the world, are ‘poisoning the American bloodstream,’ yeah, what is Lindsey Graham going to say to that except sort of try to dumb it down and make it all go away with some offhanded comments.” At the end of the day, said Steele, former Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY) put it succinctly during hearings of the House Select Committee: “The reality of it is that the stain is on you … and no matter how you try to avoid it or dress it up or put a clean shirt on, it is on you. It is embedded in your bloodstream because you are the one who injected the poison. So, the reality of it is, we’ve got to call that out.”

“We’ve got to be honest about that because I think there are things greater at stake for us as a country,” Steele added. “Each one of us on this screen right now [will] suffer consequences of [GP]’s second term. Because we have stood up against this kind of hot rhetoric, destructive rhetoric, this very divisive racist rhetoric … there is nothing good that will come from it. The man means what he said. He means what he says. A lot of people want to say, ‘Oh, he hasn’t read’ or ‘hasn’t believed it.’ Yes, he does. Yes, he does.”