‘Masshole’ is everywhere, but who started it?
A text, a joke, and a foolish quest to answer the unanswerable: Is there an origin story for the word ‘Masshole?’
I can remember it like it was yesterday, the first time someone called me a Masshole. I didn’t need it defined. But now I need to know where it came from.
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Three decades later, I was looking for a place to pull my car over so I could look at the text. Which, intriguingly, contained a link to a Chronicle segment about a Big Dig exhibit at the West End Museum. The clip opened with Dave Kruh, a former spokesperson for the Big Dig who helped create the exhibit, pointing at an aerial image of a tangle of roads, and stating that “I believe it is up there, in that 300-foot weave, where we first invented the term Masshole.”