arse about
English
Alternative forms
- arse-about (adjective)
Pronunciation
Audio (AU) (file)
Verb
arse about
- Alternative form of arse around
- (obsolete, slang) To turn round.
Adjective
arse about (not comparable)
- (slang) The wrong way round; exactly opposite to that which is desirable; contrary; conceptually inverted; wrong.
- You've got this arse-about!
- 1995, David Wills, Prosthesis, Stanford University Press, page 207,
- For the dome of the belly turned arse about has its parallel in the eye that falls out like the contents of a broken egg and that in its evocation of and preempting of regeneration becomes, in Bataille's novel, unremittingly erotic and polymorphously perverse.
- 2007, L. J. Spears, Jack Flagg, page 66:
- Strike me if wasn't thinking old Colonel Bill had got it arse about.
- 2008, Kieran Kelly, Aspiring, Pan MacMillan Australia, page 65,
- ‘This is arse-about, you know,’ I said. ‘You′ve got the athletic skills, and I'm the one going mountain climbing. […] .’
References
- [Francis] Grose [et al.] (1811), “Arse about”, in Lexicon Balatronicum. A Dictionary of Buckish Slang, University Wit, and Pickpocket Eloquence. […], London: Printed for C. Chappell, […], OCLC 23927885.