...Rough-hew them how we will.

Nothing illustrates better the remark about Britain and America being two nations divided by a common language than our respective words for posterior, gluteus maximus, rear, backside, etc, etc.

Everyone knows that the Englishman's bum is the American's hobo, and the American's butt is the Englishman's barrel for collecting rainwater or storing Malmsey. Also, I am told that behind is so closely associated in America with butts that it is rarely used to denote the position of one thing relative to another and they have to say "Get thee in back of me, Satan". Englishmen have no such problem; we happily use the word in both senses and it is hard to imagine a context in which this could cause misunderstanding.

But when we come to ass/arse the position is more complicated. Americans have only the first word and pronounce it the same whether it is the animal or the other thing. We used to have the two words meaning different things which were pronounced and spelt differently. This meant that one could call someone a silly ass (short "a") which was a very mild and respectable way of telling him he was foolish. But inconsistency and confusion crept in long ago; in the fifties one of our serious newspapers noted on one page that the cricket authorities had been accused of assing about with the selection for the next Test match while on another page in the same issue Britain was said to have kicked the debtor nations up the arse.

My own feeling is that Englishmen of taste and refinement prefer the longer word, but, sadly, American influence has meant that it is now falling out of use.

I yield to no-one in my admiration for the way Americans have enriched the English tongue, and I used to spend a lot of time writing pastiches of Hemingway or Runyon, as in the first post on this blog (not that any American ever spoke like Runyon's characters, more's the pity). But in the particular matter we have been discussing here there is no doubt that they have impoverished our common language.

Here is the proof:

The last couplet of Chaucer's The Miller's Tale provides a perfect end to the story, combining as it does a terse summary of the final situation and a pious wish which we may all share.
In a modern translation by an Englishman it goes:
Now Nicholas is branded on the bum
And God take all of us to Kingdom come.

And see what a modern American translation has done with it:
And Nicholas is branded on the butt.
This tale is done, and God save all the rout!

Lamentable!