arse about

Alternative forms

• arse-about adj

Verb

arse about

1. Alternative form of arse around
2. (obsolete, slang) To turn round.

Adjective

arse about (not comparable)

1. (slang) The wrong way round; exactly opposite to that which is desirable; contrary; conceptually inverted; wrong.

   You've got this arse-about!

   • 1995, David Wills, Prosthesis, Stanford University Press, page 207,

     For the dome of the belly turned arse about has its parallel in the eye that falls out like the contents of a broken egg and that in its evocation of and preempting of regeneration becomes, in Bataille's novel, unremittingly erotic and polymorphously perverse.

   • 2007, L. J. Spears, Jack Flagg‎, page 66:

     Strike me if wasn't thinking old Colonel Bill had got it arse about.

   • 2008, Kieran Kelly, Aspiring, Pan MacMillan Australia, page 65,

     ‘This is arse-about, you know,’ I said. ‘You′ve got the athletic skills, and I'm the one going mountain climbing. […] .’

References

• Grose, Francis, The Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue / Lexicon Balatronicum: A Dictionary of Buckish Slang, University Wit, and Pickpocket Eloquence: altered and enlarged (London; 1811)