849: arse and cuss Apr 5, 2017

When it comes to the aspects that distinguish accents or dialects, any number of subtle differences may be noted, but this tends to boil down to pronunciation, vocabulary, and certain syntactic differences. Someone from New York would not say, 'car' in the same way as someone from London, but this is more obviously a difference in pronunciation of a the same word and not a different word as is the case with 'truck' 'lorry'. In the case of 'car', it is the rhoric-r for the Americans but a non-rhotic-r for the English. It might seem that 'cuss' is just another vocabulary word, distinct from 'curse', but in fact this is due to historically non-rhotic r's employed in the southern United States that eventually got its own spelling. In America, for standards in pronunciation, people tended to use the conventions in the North where there were more people and more money, however this did not happen in the case of 'ass'. In parts of the United Kingdom that still use rhotic-r's, 'arse' is said instead of 'ass', but as luck would have it, this became an exception to the rhoticity in what is now considered Standard American English. Of course, there is no single consistent way of speaking, even in one region, which you can learn about here.