What is he talking about?

I do not understand this person:

eezus, people! Move your ass!
I hate Germantown Parkway. I always have. Until recently I was annoyed by the way everyone creeped along in rows at 35 mph leaving no way to get around them. But a week ago annoyance became near road rage. Why? Someone pointed out to me something I had never noticed: THE SPEED LIMIT ON G'TOWN PARKWAY IS 50!

I guess I always assumed the speed limit was 35 by the way everyone was driving and never bothered to look.

So now it is an even more horrible experience. As I'm darting around slow-ass creeps on their cell phones I have visions. I dream of having signs made with phrases like "Get off the f'ing phone and drive!" and "The speed limit is 50 you cow!" Thankfully I don't own a firearm so I cannot carry out my thoughts of shooting out tires.

So let this be the beginning of a word-of-mouth awareness campaign. Tell your friends. Tell your family. Tell the dillweed in the mama van. The speed limit on Germantown Parkway is 50. Move your ass!

http://www.rock103.com/pages/spencer.html

That's really funny! I'm a native speaker, so I understand it, but I don't know how to explain it in English. If you tell me your native language, I might be able to help.

<<Guest Thu Aug 28, 2008 8:21 am GMT
I do not understand this person:

eezus, people! Move your ass!
I hate Germantown Parkway. I always have. Until recently I was annoyed by the way everyone creeped along in rows at 35 mph leaving no way to get around them. But a week ago annoyance became near road rage. Why? Someone pointed out to me something I had never noticed: THE SPEED LIMIT ON G'TOWN PARKWAY IS 50!

I guess I always assumed the speed limit was 35 by the way everyone was driving and never bothered to look.

So now it is an even more horrible experience. As I'm darting around slow-ass creeps on their cell phones I have visions. I dream of having signs made with phrases like "Get off the f'ing phone and drive!" and "The speed limit is 50 you cow!" Thankfully I don't own a firearm so I cannot carry out my thoughts of shooting out tires.

So let this be the beginning of a word-of-mouth awareness campaign. Tell your friends. Tell your family. Tell the dillweed in the mama van. The speed limit on Germantown Parkway is 50. Move your ass! >>


Well, there's a lot of slang is this passage. "Move your ass" is an emphatic way of saying "speed up" or "hurry up". Adding "-ass" to the ends of words like "slow-ass" or "dumbass", etc., is just another way of adding emphasis. I'm assuming these are some of the terms that are causing confusion.

You clipped off the first word; it's supposed to be "Jeezus", an alternative spelling of "Jesus", which is used as an interjection. The writer misspelled "crept" as "creeped" (the past tense is "creeped" only in the transitive sense, such as "he creeped me out".) When he says "But a week ago annoyance", there should be a comma before "annoyance". "f'ing" is a contaction of "fucking". Other than that, I think that it's rather clear.

contaction >>> contraction

"eezus" = Jesus?

No, "Jeezus" = Jesus.

There is a common tendency to respell religious names when they are being used as cusswords. Maybe it makes it seem a little less blasphemous or disrespectful, or a little more humorous. God is often altered to Gawd, Jesus to Jeezus, Christ's sake to chrissakes. I don't think it's limited to only Americans -- the Irish loved to write "Jaysus!" (from how they tend to pronounce the word) -- but Americans, being a pretty religious lot, tend to try to euphemize a lot of swear words anyway.* This is one example.

*On the other hand, we love to say "goddamn", which apparently is considered far more rude in some other countries than it is here. And I read once that early white travellers to the west coast encountered Indian tribes who spoke no English but had picked up some of its more colorful terms from fur trappers and mountain men, and went around saying "son of a beech".