An eCard:
Well, smartass isn’t directly a compound of the adjective smart ’impertinent’ and the noun ass; instead, -ass serves here as an expressive extension of smart (as in sweet-ass ‘really sweet, big-ass ‘really big’, dumb-ass ‘really dumb’, etc.) — note He’s always asking smart-ass / dumb-ass questions — and the extended adjective was then nouned, giving an alternative to smart aleck, smartypants, and in fact the noun smarty.
From the 1988 movie version of Hairspray (which I watched for Mothers Day):
You better brace yourself for a whole lot of ugly coming from a never-ending parade of stupid.
(with reference to the consequences of integrating a teen dance show on tv).
Mass-nouning of ugly and stupid, in a single sentence. It might be relevant that the line comes from a black character, Motormouth Maybelle (played by Ruth Brown).
On nounings of stupid in several senses, with links to other discussions, see this posting.
Yesterday’s Bizarro, with a silly pun:
(#1)
The verb club ‘go to (dance) clubs’ is now with us. Let’s go verbing. And the caveman cartoon is a durable genre (right up there with the desert island cartoon and the bar cartoon).
Today’s Zits:
The latest in a series of strips depicting young people as rejecting the telephone and face-to-face interaction in favor of modern communications technology.
As a bonus, though this isn’t hot news, there’s the verbing of the noun Facebook. Plenty of examples around, for instance this one:
Honoring those who Facebooked themselves out of their jobs
The Facebook Fired blog is a painfully modern collection of stories memorializing those who are collecting unemployment thanks to posts on Facebook or similar public disclosures. (link)
In the NYT Sunday Review of 3/31, a nice piece by Henry Hitchings on nouning (“Those Irritating Verbs-as-Nouns”). The illustration:
From Gail Collins’s op-ed column “Senators Bearing Arms” yesterday, a verbing of the adjective/noun primary, as in a primary election, or simply a primary: being primaried by the Tea Party.
