It has been noted by stoner movies and people with too much time on their hands that if you say a word enough times in a row, you can make it strange.

I'm not even talking about the obvious words, like arboreal or bureaucracy or water.

But even just like cat.

Cat.

Cat.

Why is that our word for our most self-possessed house pet?

Sometimes a word doesn't need repetition or narcotics to get weird to you.

In fact, in the odds, a word behaving in a very specific way, jumped out to Eric Schoyer,

an animator in Portland, Oregon, just in the course of a regular conversation.

I definitely remember the first time a friend of mine came to me and said, like,

somebody was talking about her son being a grown-ass man. I've never heard that before.

Eric couldn't remember hearing or noticing someone drop ass into a phrase for emphasis before either.

I'm pretty white. I'm pretty Caucasian. Most of my friends are. And I know that slang,

by the time that we're using it, or me, it is old news by decades elsewhere. Old news or

otherwise, he took a shine to it. Somehow to my ears, it made complete sense immediately. After that, you couldn't stop hearing it. You know, he's a grown-ass man. You're, you know, get your stupid-ass face away from me or whatever. Hey, hey, I'm a grown-ass man. Campbell's suit. It's just wet-ass food. I think I wore this nice-ass shirt for her today. You know you got a big

ass knife sticking out of you? Big ass, nice ass, grown ass, dead ass, hard ass, badass, badass, badass,

stupid ass, silly ass, goofy ass, loud ass. There seems to be no adjective you can't make funnier

or more forceful just by dropping an ass on it. It just seems like the word ass intensifies.

It's a slightly more risque way of saying very.

Eric has even come to think of this linguistic quirk by a special name.

The ass intensifier.

He's now spent years wondering about the ass intensifier.

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