Asshole: How I Got Rich and Happy by Not Giving a Shit About You

Asshole: How I Got Rich and Happy by Not Giving a Shit About You is a 2008 spoof self-help book and memoir by American author Martin Kihn. The book's title in the U.S. was modified to Asshole: How I Got Rich & Happy by Not Giving a Damn About Anyone & How You Can, Too.

Content

The first line of Marty Kihn’s book, is "I was the nicest guy in the world and it was killing me." Kihn, who works for a marketing company, is told by his boss that unless he started "playing hardball", they were going to demote him and upgrade a colleague Kihn calls "The Nemesis" to a window office. So to save his career, Kihn decides to turn himself into an asshole, and in telling his story, he describes exactly how the reader can follow his lead.

To become an asshole, Kihn builds a team, consisting of an acting coach, life coach and both personal and dog trainer – to help "master the art of assholism." Kihn then creates a ten-step "assholism" program which involves "ignoring other peoples’ feelings, never saying sorry, dressing in black silk and only eating red meat." Other tasks saw Kihn signing up to the National Rifle Association, learning kickboxing, screaming at colleagues and eating garlic bagels on public transport. Additionally, Kihn takes inspiration from famous figures whom he considers "assholes" such as: Donald Trump, Rudy Giuliani, Martha Stewart, David Letterman, Ayn Rand, Nicole Kidman, Machiavelli, Scarface and Paris Hilton. He also takes inspiration from Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead and The Virtue of Selfishness.

Asshole

The word asshole (often arsehole in British and Australian English), is a vulgarism to describe the anus, and often used pejoratively (as a type of synecdoche) to refer to people.

History

The word arse in English derives from the Germanic root -arsaz, which originated from the Proto-Indo-European root -ors, meaning "buttocks" or "backside". The combined form arsehole is first attested from 1500 in its literal use to refer to the anus. The metaphorical use of the word to refer to the worst place in a region (e.g., "the arsehole of the world"), is first attested in print in 1865; the use to refer to a contemptible person is first attested in 1933. In the ninth chapter of his 1945 autobiography, Black Boy, Richard Wright quotes a snippet of verse that uses the term: "All these white folks dressed so fine / Their ass-holes smell just like mine ...". Its earliest known usage in newspaper as an insult was 1965. As with other vulgarities, these uses of the word may have been common in oral speech for some time before their first appearances in print. By the 1970s, Hustler magazine featured people they did not like as "Asshole of the Month." In 1972, Jonathan Richman of Modern Lovers recorded his song "Pablo Picasso", which includes the line "Pablo Picasso was never called an asshole."

Counter (typography)

In typography, a counter is the area of a letter that is entirely or partially enclosed by a letter form or a symbol (the counter-space/the hole of). Letters containing closed counters include A, B, D, O, P, Q, R, a, b, d, e, g, o, p, and q. Letters containing open counters include c, f, h, i, s etc. The digits 0, 4, 6, 8, and 9 also possess a counter. An aperture is the opening between an open counter and the outside of the letter.

The lowercase 'g' has two typographic variants: the single-story '' has one closed counter and one open counter (and hence one aperture); the double-story '' has two closed counters.

Open and closed apertures

Different typeface styles have different tendencies to use open or more closed apertures. This design decision is particularly important for sans-serif typefaces, which can have very wide strokes making the apertures very narrow indeed.

Fonts designed for legibility often have very open apertures, keeping the strokes widely separated from one another to reduce ambiguity. This may be especially important in situations such as signs to be viewed at a distance, materials intended to be viewed by people with vision problems, or small print, especially on poor-quality paper. Fonts with open apertures include Lucida Grande, Trebuchet MS, Corbel and Droid Sans, all designed for use on low-resolution displays, and Frutiger, FF Meta and others designed for print use. This design trend has become increasingly common with the spread of humanist sans-serif designs since the 1980s and the 1990s and the use of computers requiring new fonts which are legible on-screen.