jay / jaywalk

A 1937 anti-jaywalking poster created under the auspices of the U. S. federal Works Projects Administration. Drawing of a pedestrian being struck by a car, the driver of which is horrified, while a policeman looks on helpless to prevent it. The caption reads: “Don’t Jaywalk. Watch Your Step.”

26 February 2021

Jaywalking is the act of crossing a street in the middle of the block, a disruptive, if not downright dangerous, practice. But why jay? That comes from an old sense of the bird’s name referring to a disagreeable or stupid person, a simpleton, a rube. Jays, while often beautiful in appearance, are disagreeable birds, driving away and stealing food from other birds. And a jaywalker thinks he owns the street, and cars just better get out of his way.

The word jay comes from the Old French jay (modern French geai). It makes its English appearance some time prior to 1350. We find the word in a love poem that appears in the manuscript British Library, Harley 2253, a manuscript which is a trove of early Middle English lyrics:

Heo is dereworthe in day:
Graciouse, stout, ant gay,
Gentil, jolyf so the jay,
Wohrliche when heo waketh.

(She is precious by day:
Gracious, bold, and gay,
Gentle, jolly as the jay,
Beautiful when she wakes.)

In this poem, the bird is compared favorably to the speaker’s lover, but within a few centuries, poets were calling out the bird’s more disagreeable qualities. John Skelton, a satirist known for his innovative rhyme schemes, dubbed Skeltonics, was among the first to call a disagreeable person a jay. He does so in his 1523 poem Goodly Garlande, a 1600-line poem, modeled after Chaucer’s House of Fame, in which he praises his own poetry and places himself among the great poets. In this passage, he defends his poem Philip Sparrow, about the death of a pet sparrow, so while he is applying jay to critics who offer unconstructive criticism, the context retains the association with birds:

For the gyse now a days
Of sum iangrlyng iays
Is to discommende
what they can not amende
Though they wolde spende
All the wittis they haue

A century later, Shakespeare uses jay in this sense outside of the context of birds, indicating that the sense of a disagreeable or obtuse person had fully entered the language. From the play Cymbeline, which was written sometime before April 1611:

Thou didd’st accuse him of Incontinencie;
Thou then look’dst like a Villaine; now, methink es
Thy favours good enough. Some Iay of Italy
(Whose mother was her painting) hath betraid him.

The specific sense of a disagreeable or obtuse person who disrupts traffic by crossing the street in the middle of the block arises in Kansas City, Missouri in 1911, or at least that’s where it’s first recorded. An article in the Kansas City Star of 30 April 1911 has this to say about New Yorkers:

Gay New York or Jay New York—it is spelled both ways and either is correct.

[...]

Kansas City used to consider itself a town of jay walkers. That is another line in which New York deserves the discredit of being at the front of the procession. A typical Manhattian would be run over and trampled on the sidewalk if he tried to walk on State street in Chicago as he walks on Broadway, New York. He has never heard of the prehistoric principle of keeping to the right—he ambles all over the sidewalk. A facsimile of his trail would show that he had pursued a course as crooked as that of a serpent with a bun on. There ought to be a traffic policeman stationed on every corner to keep the pedestrians straightened out.

And around this time Kansas City was one of the first cities to pass an ordinance forbidding jay walking. An article in the Seattle Daily Times a year later takes note of this new law and discusses how the term came arose:

It seems that Kansas City, proud of her rank in twentieth place, has been getting metropolitan. Vehicular traffic having been regulated according to big-city notions or necessities, she has turned her attention to footfarers. Harking to the protestations of horse and motor drivers that many accidents have been due less to carelessness on their part than to the heedlessness of footers, she has ordained that persons may not walk across her streets, or her most frequented streets, except at crossings made and provided.

“Legislation of this sort rubs human nature the wrong way by seeming an arbitrary intrusion upon personal liberties. It’s a challenge to free-born citizens to cross streets wherever and however they blooming please. Wherefore by a happy inspiration Kansas City has cut the psychological knot and persuaded her most touchy citizens that they really prefer to observe the direction laid down in the ordinance. All this by the simple expedient of dubbing corner cutting “jay walking.”

Your true Kansas Citizen abhors above most things being deemed a jay—signifying a bumpkin, rube or gink. Rather than incur any such invidious thought he is prepared to walk rectangularly or any other way considered truly citified and comme il faut. By the magic phrase, jay walker, the hurried business man of the twentieth city has been redeemed from his devious and kittycornered path and made to walk rectilinearly if not uprightly in the fear of ridicule.

It seems that Kansas City struck upon an innovative way to promote civic virtue among its citizens. Shame can be a powerful tool when applied judiciously.

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Sources:

“Ichot a Burde in Boure Bryht / Blow, Northerne Wynd.” The Complete Harley 2253 Manuscript, vol. 2 of 3. Susanna Greer Fein, ed. U of Rochester TEAMS Middle English Text Series, 2014. London, British Library, MS Harley 2252, fol. 72v.  

“In Simple, Child-Like New York.” Kansas City Star, 30 April 1911, 4. Newsbank: America’s Historical Newspapers.

“Jay Walking.” Seattle Daily Times (Washington), 11 April 1912, 6. Newsbank: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. jay-walker, n., jay, n.

Shakespeare, William. Cymbeline, 3.4. First Folio, 1623, Oxford, Bodleian MS Arch. G c.7, 382–3.

Skelton, John. A Ryght Delectable Treatyse Upon a Goodly Garlande or Chapelet of Laurell. London: Richard Faukes, 1523, lines 1261–66.

Image credit: Isadore Posoff, Work Projects Administration Federal Art Project, Pennsylvania, 1937. Library of Congress. Public domain image.

java / joe

Coffee beans

25 February 2021

Java and joe are American slang terms for coffee. Java has a definitive and straightforward origin, while the origin of joe is a bit mysterious, although we have two very good possibilities, both of which connect to the earlier slang term Java.

That earlier term comes from the name of the island in what is now Indonesia. In the late seventeenth century, Dutch planters imported coffee from Arabia, and by the mid eighteenth century Java coffee was being drunk in Britain and Europe. From the 1759 Chemical Works of Caspar Neumann:

Three sorts of Coffee are distinguished in trade; Arabian or Levant, East-Indian or Java, and West-Indian or Surinam Coffee.

And we have this discussion of the Dutch trade in coffee in Adam Anderson’s 1764 An Historical and Chronological Deduction of the Origin of Commerce:

About the Year 1690, the Dutch began to plant it at Batavia, in the Island of Java: And in 1719 it was first imported thence into Holland. Since the Dutch have planted a great Deal of Coffee in Ceylon as well as in Java. Insomuch that, Anno 1743, they imported into Holland 3,555,877 Pound Weight of from Java, and at same Time but 12,368 Pounds from Mocha: So greatly had they improved their Java Coffee.

I was only a matter of time before Java coffee was clipped to simply Java. From the 1805 Commercial Secretary, a book of examples of correspondence for those wishing to learn about conducting international trade. The reference here is to coffee from Java:

The goods are arrived; the quality of the sugar is pretty good, but we cannot say the same of the coffee. The Java is of a very ordinary sort indeed. By the same ship we have received some Java from another house in your place, equally good, and three shillings lower.

But Java would generalize to mean coffee of any type. In Lewis Garrard’s 1850 account of his travels through the American west, he refers to Java several times. We cannot be sure he didn’t specifically mean coffee from Java, but he probably didn’t:

The visits of the Indians were divided between Mr. Bent's lodge, and our own; but we saw as many as we wished, for our coffee and sugar cost us a dollar a pound. To secure the good will and robes of the sensitive men, we had to offer our dear-bought Java at meal time—the period of the greatest congregation. Still, their company was acceptable, as their manners, conversation, and pipes, were agreeable.

But Jack Black in his 1926 autobiography You Can’t Win, unambiguously uses Java to mean coffee of any type, as in this case where the tramps he is sleeping rough with would clearly not be discriminating about their choice of coffee beans when they have no food to eat:

We went back to the fire and discussed breakfast. “Nothing but Java,” said the bum that had the coffee.

"I'll go to the farmhouse," I volunteered, "and buy something."

"Nix, nix," said one; "buy nothin'," said the other, "it's you kind of cats that make it tough on us, buyin' chuck. They begin to expect money. You go up to that house," pointing to a place on a small rise, about fifteen minutes' walk, "and tell the woman you and two other kids run away from home in the city three days ago and you ain't had nothin' but a head of cabbage that fell off a farmer's wagon between youse since you left. Tell her you are on your way back home and the other two kids are down by the bridge so hungry they can't walk. On your way up there git a phony name and street number ready in case she asks you questions. She'll give you a sit-down for yourself, chances are, but bring back a 'lump' for us.”

Joe, on the other hand, appears in the early years of the twentieth century. There are two leading explanations for the slang term. The first explanation is that joe is a clipping of jamocha or jamoke, itself a blend of Java and Mocha. (Today, we know mocha as a mix of coffee and chocolate, but the term originally referred to coffee from Mocha or al-Makha in what is now Yemen.) An article in the Atlanta Constitution from 17 July 1899 places jamoca as one of several diner slang terms:

If one sat down to the table and ordered chops and eggs the order went to the cook as: “A stack of reds and two in the air,” and while lost in wonderment and vainly endeavoring to find out what he meant, down would come the dishes with a meal equal to anything at the big hotels.

“A dozen in the grease: meant fried oysters; “one jamoca” was for a cup of coffee; “pompano for fifty,” which would undoubtedly cause you to clutch your purse and run, meant simply a half-dollar order of fish; “pork and—,” translated was, “bring beans on the side,” while “ham and—straight up” gave the patron ham with eggs that were soft on top.

And a grocery ad in the New York Daily Tribune of 28 August 1899 advertises a “Jamoka Blend,” obviously a mix of beans from Java and al-Makha.

An “Oscar und Adolf” cartoon: the title characters are running a restaurant and Osgar, the waiter, gives the orders to the cook, Adolf, via a music box, where a particular song selection means a particular dish; in this musical code, Stephen Foster’s “Old Black Joe” means coffee without cream.

The second explanation is that it is taken from an old, Stephen Foster song from 1860, “Old Black Joe.” The song is about a slave named Joe and has absolutely nothing to do with coffee, but the black, according to the hypothesis, refers to black coffee, and the < j > was shared with the earlier Java. We see this connection in an Osgar und Adolf cartoon of 27 February 1911 where the two title characters are running a restaurant, and Osgar communicates the customer’s orders to Adolf in the kitchen via a music box:

Diss moosik box shoult make you der order plain, Adolf. For instance ven id plays “Old Black Joe” id means coffee mitoudt cream—“Bring Me a Rose” means Limberger cheece—und “Come Under My Plaidie” means oatmeal porridge.

Not only does the cartoon connect the slang term to the Stephen Foster song, but it also shows that joe was established slang by 1911; otherwise, that line in the cartoon would not have made sense. But whether the song was an inspiration for the slang term or an after-the-fact connection is not known.

An incorrect explanation that is often given is that joe originated in U.S. Navy slang in reference to the Secretary of the Navy Josephus Daniels, who banned alcohol on U.S. Navy ships in 1914. The story goes that coffee was substituted for the traditional rum, and the sailors took to calling coffee joe in retaliation. A neat story, but as we’ve seen, the slang term was already in existence when Daniels dried out the Navy.

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Sources:

Anderson, Adam. An Historical and Chronological Deduction of the Origin of Commerce, vol. 2 of 2. London: A. Millar, 1764, 88. Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO).

Black, Jack. You Can’t Win. New York: Macmillan, 1926, 67. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

The Commercial Secretary (Le Secrétaire du Commerce). Paris: Chez Saintin, 1805, 30.

Condo. “Osgar und Adolf” (cartoon). Tacoma Times (Washington), 27 February 1911, 4. Library of Congress, Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers.

Display Ad. New York Daily Tribune, 28 August 1899, 12. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

Garrard, Lewis. Wah-To-Yah, and the Taos Trail. Cincinnati: H.W. Derby, 1850, 62. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Green’s Dictionary of Slang, 2021, s.v. java, n., joe, n.4., jamoke, n.1.

Lewis, William. The Chemical Works of Caspar Neumann. London: W. Johnston, 1759, 378. Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO).

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, September 2011, s.v. Java, n.; second edition, 1989, s.v. joe, n.3.

“Story of a Queer Cafe in New York.” Atlanta Constitution, 17 July 1899, 5. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

Photo credit: Robert Knapp, 2010. Used under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

jackleg / blackleg

24 February 2021

[Update 25 February 2021: added mention of the strikebreaker sense.]

A jackleg is a professional, especially a lawyer or preacher, who is an imposter or otherwise untrained or dishonest. As an adjective it can refer to anything that is done hastily or unskillfully. The term in an Americanism, found predominantly in the South and South Midland regions.

Jackleg is probably an alteration of an older British slang term for a swindler or dishonest person: blackleg. The metaphor underlying blackleg is lost, but the term appears first in horseracing circles as a term for a dishonest bettor or bookmaker. As for jackleg, the switch to jack is probably from the use of the name Jack as a generic term for a man (Cf. jackknife).

The adjective black-legged appears in October 1761 in a description of an upset in a horse race in the St. James Chronicle, or the British Evening Post:

On Thursday the Fifty Pounds for Five and Six-year-olds, and Aged Horses, was won by

Mr Hillier’s chestnut Mare, Fair Rachel,        2   2   1   1
Mr. Wanley’s brown Horse,                          1   3   3   2
Lord Craven’s dun Horse, Valiant,              3   1   2   3

This Day’s Sport, as well as Tuesdays, afforded great Diversion to the Ignorant, whilst the Black-legged Gentry went off with heavier Hearts than Purses.—Rachael was backed with Odds against the Field before starting; but being beat in the first Heat by Mr. Wanley, after a strong Contest, and Lord Craven’s Horse having lain by, the Bets changed, and Valiant was taken Even-Money against the Field. The Second Heat was won by his Lordship, upon which the Odds rose till they were Eight to One: But in the Third Heat the dun Horse sunk to Rachael; and in the Fourth the Contest was very strong between the Mare and Mr. Wanley’s Horse, whom she beat only by a length.

The noun blackleg, referring to an unscrupulous bookmaker, makes its appearance a few years later in a 17 June 1767 letter to the Gazetteer and New Daily Advertiser by a man calling himself Tim Pennyless (obviously not his real name), who describes how the gamblers took advantage of his inexperience at the track:

I was in the company with three young fellows, old acquaintances of mine, who invited me to the races at Epsom (a diversion, as by mistake it is called) I never had seen. They dressed it up in so many charms to me, that the most romantic idea could hardly equal; nay, they assured me, it was one of the great doors of the world to let me into public notice, and as a tradesman, it was the best introduction I could meet with, for I should have the opportunity of mingling with the Nobility, and of being known to them, as any man had a right to make a bett, even Buckhorse himself, could, with propriety and decency, take or lay the odds with Lord B. Lord M. Sir C. B. &c. And to enable myself to better parade the course, they advised me to purchase a genteel gelding, and that if I took with me a cool hundred, they did not doubt, but by their management, I should multiply it to three or four hundred pounds, for that they were intimate with some of those, who, in the modern turf-language, are called Deep Ones, alias Knowing Ones, alias Black Legs, or in the open intelligent language of fair truth, Vagabonds, Imposters, and Thieves.

In the mid nineteenth century in Britain, blackleg took on the more specific meaning of a strikebreaker, a scab. The shift from a swindler to a strikebreaker is a natural one. That sense drove the swindler sense out of use in Britain, although the strikebreaker sense has not taken hold in North America.

Speaking of North America, jackleg is recorded in a 20 May 1822 letter to the Herald of the Valley of Fincastle, Virginia, a town at the southern end of the Shenandoah Valley. The letter is simply wonderful. It appears to be a response to some incident where someone took offense to being called a jackleg, and it is in the style of a medieval dream vision drawing upon the guided tours of the underworld in Virgil’s Aeneid and Dante’s Inferno:

I rode out the other evening, and finding myself much fatigued, I reclined under the shade of a large oak;—I fell into the following train of reflection: The prophet Joel, had answered me in the spirit of forgiveness and christian fellowship, stating that if he had known there was a real jack-legged lawyer present, when he used the expression, he never would have wounded his feelings with the hateful appellation.

My imagination became weary with the subject; I was seized with a deep sleep. During my slumbers, I was conducted by a Genius, into the unknown regions, after a long journey we came to the river Styx; Charon was in an unusual good humor, and ferried us over without receiving any compensation. We at length arrived at the fields of Tartarus, I beheld a multitude of people in the most anxious suspense. I saw epicures, with the keenest appetites, unsatisfied; hypocrites without the least possibility of lying and slandering their neighbors; and among the rest I saw a growing host, wringing their hands and crying “repent, repent, and be converted;” the sight harrowed up my soul with horror, I was for a moment dumb, as soon as I recovered strength to speak, I asked my guide, who are those in such agonizing distress? she immediately replied, they are jacklegged Methodist preachers who came into the service of the Lord uncalled for; they carry in one hand the book of life, and in the other the dagger of death; the moment you trust them, they shed the hearts blood of confiding adoration.

I saw Joel on his trial, in the court of Radamanthus. I had a great deal of conversation with the officers of the court; it was generally supposed, that from the credibility of the witnesses, deduced against him, he would be convicted and sentenced to class himself among the jack legs. I really sympathized with him, in his deplorable situation, until I reflected that a man, who (to use his own words) jacks himself about the tabernacles of the Lord, preaching repentance to the people, ought to do it with an honest heart, and a clear conscience. This same Joel seemed to be religious and bridled not his tongue, but he deceived his own heart.

They don’t write newspapers like they used to.

Both blackleg and jackleg remain in current use.

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Sources:

“Burford Races, Oxfordshire.” St. James Chronicle, or the British Evening Post (London). 15 October–17 October 1761, 5. Gale Primary Sources: Burney Newspapers Collection.

Dictionary of American Regional English, 2013, s.v. jackleg, adj.

The Gazetteer and New Daily Advertiser (London), 17 June 1767, 4. Gale Primary Sources: Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century Burney Newspapers Collection.

Green’s Dictionary of Slang, 2021, s.v. jackleg, adj., jackleg, n.

Herald of the Valley (Fincastle, Virginia), 20 May 1822, 3. Newsbank: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, March 2018, s.v. jackleg, adj. and n., jack-legged, adj.; September 2011, s.v. blackleg, n., black-legged, adj.

jackknife

Roman jackknife (left) with its wooden handle rotted away, found at Gellep, Germany, and a modern reconstruction next to it

23 February 2021

A jackknife is a clasp knife, one where the blade folds into the handle. Clasp knives have been around since antiquity, but the term jackknife dates to the mid seventeenth century and arose in the north of England or in Scotland. The word is clearly a compound of Jack + knife, but why the word Jack was chosen is uncertain. There are two contending theories, one that is favored by present-day dictionaries and an older one that is now less favored but cannot be ruled out.

The favored explanation is that it comes from a blend of jack of the leg or jack of the leg. Clasp knives are, to this day, known as jocktelegs in the north of England and Scotland. The jack is from the use of that word to denote a generic man, and the leg is thought to refer to the fact that the handles of such knives were often carved in shape a human leg. To this day, jambette (little leg) is used in dialectal French to refer to a clasp knife.

The second explanation is that it comes from the name of a seventeenth-century Flemish maker of knives, Jacques de Liège. The very existence of such a cutler is disputed, but there is evidence of clasp knives bearing his or a similar name once existed. Jacques de Liège could easily become Jack the Leg in the mouths of non-French speakers.

The earliest known appearance of a form of jackknife or jockteleg is in an inventory of the wares of the late merchant William Mackerrell of Newcastle upon Tyne conducted on 13 November 1642:

a dozen Jackalegg knives        1[£] 1[s.] 6[d.]

The next year, an Edinburgh legal document (Edinburgh Testaments 40.233) has:

Auchteine jackteleges at ix s. the peice, […] Elevin vther blak knyfes of that samyn sort

And jockteleg may be familiar to non-Scots speakers through the poetry of Robert Burns, who used the word several times in his poetry. For example, from his “On the Late Captain Grose's Peregrinations Thro' Scotland,” about the antiquarian and lexicographer of slang:

Forbye, he’ll shape you aff fu’gleg
The cut of Adam’s philibeg;
The knife that nicket Abel’s craig
                     He’ll prove you fully,
It was a faulding jocteleg,
                   Or lang-kail gullie.

(Besides, he’ll tailor you off very quickly
The cut of Adam’s kilt;
The knife that nicked Abel’s throat
He will prove to you fully,
It was a folding jockteleg,
Or a long cabbage knife.)

The form jack knife appears in the records of the Hudson’s Bay Company from 7 December 1683. The minutes of a subcommittee meeting from that day read:

Ordered Mr. Sam Banner provide 1000 hatchetts for Porte Nellson thus Sorted

500 large
250 Middle
250 Small

Likwise Knives thus sorted

1800 Long Knives large box hartes
  900 long Small Knives Ditto
1000 Rochbury large Ditto
  500 Ditto Small Ditto
1000 Jack Knives

And have Agreed wth. him for the prices following
large hatchetts             14d.
Small Ditto                 10d.
Middle Ditto               12d.
Jack Knives                 2 1/2 s. p. Do.
Rochbury large            2s 8d. p. Doz.
Ditto Small                  22d. p. Do.
Long Knives large       2s. 9d. p. Do.
Ditto Small                  2s. 2d. p. Do.

a Sample of the Jack Knives was now Delivered him Marked wth. the flower Deluce att one End of the Letters and the harte att the Other End of the Letters wch. are
            I A C Q U E G I N E R

And the minutes of the full committee meeting later that day read:

Ordered Mr. Samll. Banner put the marke of a Lyon and owne Name upon the Jack knives

Here we have the first evidence of a cutler by the name of Jacques. The English company ordered its supplier to rebrand the knives, making them appear more English and less French, by removing the name Jacques Giner and the fleur-de-lis, replacing them with the supplier’s name and the image of a lion.

Early commentary on the etymology was dominated by this explanation. David Dalrymple (Lord Hailes) in his Scottish glossary of c.1776 wrote of jockteleg:

The etymology of this word remained unknown till not many years ago an old knife was found having this inscription Jacques de Liege, the name of the cutler

And in his 1864 Industrial Biography: Iron-Workers and Tool-Makers, Samuel Smiles says the word is:

merely a corruption of Jacques de Liege, a famous foreign cutler, whose knives were as well known throughout Europe as those of Rogers or Mappin are now.

The entry for 21 June 1671 in The Account Book of Sir John Foulis of Ravelston reads:

for a Jock the Leg knife          00[£] 8[s.] 0[d.] 

To which the editor A.W.C. Hallen notes:

A common name for a clasp-knife made originally at Sheffield by Jacques de Liège, a Fleming.

But in the twentieth century, doubt was cast on the Jacques de Liège explanation and the idea that the knife is so named because its handle was often carved in the shape of a leg became the favored one. A June 1933 article about an auction of a knife collection in the magazine The Connoisseur disparages the Jacques de Liège explanation:

Somerville persists in terming these folding travellers' knives jocktelegs, so- called, according to him, after "John of Liege, the most celebrated cutler in that city in the century before last (i.e., the seventeenth century), and the inventor of that species of manufacture." David Dalrymple, Lord Hailes, or one of his archaeological friends, was apparently responsible for the existence of this Jacques de Liège. His name had been found, so he asserted, on an old knife but no trace of this cutler is discoverable in that city. Samuel Smiles did not hesitate, however, to accept him as a distinguished cutler "whose knives were as well known throughout Europe, as those of Rogers or Mappin are now " And Hallen, in his notes to The Account Book of Sir John Foulis of Ravelston, went one better when he asserted that these knives were "made originally at Sheffield by Jacques de Liège, a Fleming.

Hailes, it would appear, was having his leg pulled by some ingenious friend with more imagination than honesty. Jocktele—on the analogy of Jockteleear (Jock the liar), a small almanack full of unreliable statements—is probably Jock the leg, a clasp knife of which the haft was fashioned as a human leg. These jambettes, with which, among "autres raretez de cette nature" [other rarities of this nature], one of Madame de Maintenon's earliest lovers sought to win her complaisance, and the later and better made couteaux à jambe de Princesse [princess-leg knives], described and illustrated by Perret, were to be found in every country in Europe. Sometimes the limb represented on surviving specimens is that of a man of fashion; sometimes that of a country bumpkin; most often it is the stockinged and gartered extremity of one of the fair sex. Frequently they were adorned with mottoes of a far from improving character. One in the British Museum bears the inoffensive legend:—

HEAR IS A LEG AND FOOT
AND A GOOD BLADE TOOT.

But the Jacques de Liège explanation should not be dismissed so easily. There is early evidence, as seen in the Hudson’s Bay Company records, that clasp knives from such a manufacturer did in fact exist. While the evidence is somewhat sketchy, it is there.

Jackknife is also used figuratively to refer something that bends back on itself. Its use as a verb to refer to a vehicle turning so that it doubles back on its trailer in a vee-shape dates to 1886, originally referring to a cart pulled by an animal, but now used chiefly of trucks pulling a semi-trailer. And it’s use as a type of dive in the pike position dates to 1906.

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Sources:

Beard, Charles R. “Fiske Collection for Sheffield.” The Connoisseur, 91.382, June 1933, 389. ProQuest Magazines.

Burns, Robert. “On the Late Captain Grose's Peregrinations Thro' Scotland.” Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect, vol. 2 of 2. Edinburgh: T. Cadell, 1797, 222. HathTrust Digital Archive.

Dictionaries of the Scots Language, 2021, s.v. jockteleg, n., Jackteleg, n.

Hallen, A.W. Cornelius, ed. “Ane Account of Depursements Begun 1671 1 De[cembe]r,” The Account Book of Sir John Foulis of Ravelston, 1671–1707. Publications of the Scottish Historical Society 16. Edinburgh: University Press, 1894, 6. HathTrust Digital Archive.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, March 2018, s.v. jackknife, n., jackknife, v., jockteleg, n.; second edition, 1989, s.v. jockteleg.

Rich, E.E. Minutes of the Hudson’s Bay Company 1679–1984, Second Part, 1682–84. Toronto: Champlain Society, 1946, 171–72.

Smiles, Samuel. Industrial Biography: Iron-Workers and Tool-Makers. Boston: Ticknor and Fields: 1864. 133. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Spufford, Margaret. The Great Reclothing of Rural England: Petty Chapmen and their Wares in the Seventeenth Century. London: Hambledon Press, 1984, 188. HathTrust Digital Archive.

Photo credit: Jeroen Zuiderwijk, 2006, public domain image.

Jack Robinson

22 February 2021

The phrase before you can say Jack Robinson means very quickly, in no time at all. But who was Jack Robinson, and how did his name become associated with speed?

The phrase doesn’t seem to be based on an actual person of that name. Rather, it appears to use a generic name for a man. Jack has been used to refer to a generic male since the fourteenth century, and Robinson is a common English surname. Nor does the phrase seem to have any particular story attached to it, although some have speculated without evidence as to that. It just seems to be a short, uncomplicated name that can be reeled off the tongue quickly.

The phrase makes its appearance in print in the Edinburgh Magazine of November 1762 in a letter describing the death of an officer in a naval battle:

I was sorry for the commodore of the castle, cause he was a brave fellow; a ball came aboard of him, under the larboard-side of his breast, and clapped a stopper upon his commission, before one could say Jack Robinson.

But lest one think that there could be naval origin to the phrase, there is this letter from a few months later in the London Magazine of January 1763 describing the latest fashion in women’s hairstyling:

You cannot but have taken notice, sir, you who are so universally conversant with the ladies, that of late, there appears to be an additional growth of hair on the heads (I say, Sir, on the heads) of such of our females as are commonly seen in places of public entertainment: there seems, since the present fashion, to be an additional quantity, both in front and rear. Now possibly you imagine this increase to be owing to some newly discovered pomatum, bear’s grease, or something of that sort. —No such thing. It is entirely owing to the French manner of Frizzlation. Perhaps you have no idea how this is performed. I’ll tell you, Sir,——Monsieur having, with an inimitable air of gentility, deposited his utensils on the table, and familiarly enquired after her ladyship’s health, begins his operation thus: he dextrously separates from the rest, six hairs near the crown of the head, twists them between his thumb and finger, rolls them up from the points to the root, and before you can say Jack Robinson, locks them fast in a square inch of paper. He then takes the next six hairs towards the front, papering them up in the same manner; and thus he proceeds in a strait line, from the crown of the head towards the nose, till he completes a file (to speak in the military phrase) of ten papers. He then gradually descends towards the right ear, which exactly completes a rank of 30 papers.

Clearly, the phrase had been established for some time before seeing its way into print. And it appears in a number of diverse places over the ensuing decades.

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Sources:

“Another Letter of the Sailor from the Havannah.” Edinburgh Magazine, November 1762, 548. Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO).

Green’s Dictionary of Slang, 2021, s.v. Jack Robinson, n.

London Magazine, January 1763, 32. Eighteenth Century Collections Online (EEBO).

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, March 2018, s.v. Jack Robinson, n., Jack, n.2.