Dr. Metablog

"Bottom" is another of the many words that came into my life through the medium of baseball. As soon as I was able to walk and talk, I learned that an inning has both a "top" and a "bottom." "Bottom of the ninth" was an optimistic phrase because there was always the Ebbets Field hope that the Dodgers might come through with a game-winning rally. Later, when I discovered that there was more to human existence than baseball, the various and colorful meanings of "bottom" began to reveal themselves. For example, the posterior part of the human body, which I knew as the ass or the behind or the tuchas, was, I learned, called the "bottom" by people of sophistication. A euphemism?  A Britishism? 

Even later on, I discovered that bottom, signifying buttocks or butt was not the root meaning of the word but a metaphorical extension of its original sense. Old English botm, cognate with Latin fundus, meant land or farm or soil. This meaning of "bottom" is well-preserved in the phrase "bottom land" — the level and fertile acres along the banks of a watercourse. Many English family names are consequently topographical surnames of ancient inhabitants of various river fronts — such as Bottoms, Robottom, Higginbottom, Ramsbottom, Longbottom, Winterbottom, and Bottomley. Names that have nothing to do with either innings or asses.

The oddity that "bottom" can refer both to farmland and to the human butt can sometimes yield unconscious comedy. For example, in 1977, I was a guest at a wedding in the infelicitously named Kent village of Pett Bottom. I must hope that Pett is a variant of Pitt, a "hollow," rather than commonplace "pet" with a supernumerary "t".

These days, "bottom" is more likely to mean something like "the essence" — as in such phrases "to get to the bottom of the matter"; or "the bottom of one's heart."

And then there's egregious Bottom in A Midsummer Night's Dream, who does not disdain the mandatory pun: "This is to make an ass of me."