metes and bounds / bounds / boundary

Young women beating the bounds near St. Albans, Hertforshire, 1913. Image of nine young women standing beside a fence and holding sticks. In Britain it was, and in some places still is, customary for parishioners to “beat the bounds” of the parish to mark its borders on rogation days.

8 March 2021

Metes and bounds is a legal term used in real property law. Black’s Law Dictionary defines it thusly:

1. The territorial limits of real property as measured by distances and angles from designated landmarks and in relation to adjoining properties. 2. The method of describing a tract by limits so measured, esp. when the descriptions of the limits are arranged as a series of instructions that, if followed, result in traveling along the tract's boundaries.

Bounds remains familiar to present-day speakers, but metes has passed into the realm of arcane legal jargon. Both terms were borrowed from Anglo-Norman French.

Bound appears in English by the late thirteenth century, at first as a noun denoting a stone property marker, later generalizing to the property line itself. It appears in the poem Laȝamon’s Brut, a poetic, fanciful history of Britain. The poem survives in two extant manuscripts, both dating to 1275–1300, but it was probably composed c. 1200. This particular instance is of note not only because it is an early appearance of a form of the word bound, but it also marks the shift from an Old English predecessor to the Anglo-Norman term in English writing. The relevant passage in the manuscript British Library, MS Cotton Caligula A 1x (from here on out “Caligula”) reads:

Þa comen heo to þan bunnen.
pa Hercules makede; mid muchelen his strengðe.
pat weoren postes longe; of marmon stane stronge.
Þat taken makede Hærcules; pat lond þe þer-abuten wes.
swiðe brod & swiðe long; al hit stod an his hand.

(Then they came to the bounds
That Hercules had made, with his great strength.
It was made of long posts of strong marble.
Hercules had made that token: that the land thereabout was
very broad and very long; it all stood in his possession.)

But the other manuscript, Cotton Otho C Xiii (that is Otho), uses the word wonigge instead of bunnen. The word wunung is Old English meaning dwelling or place of habitation, and its Early Middle English use could denote land or country. The line in the Otho manuscript reads:

Þo comen hi to þan wonigge þat Hercules makede.

(Then they came to the land that Hercules founded.)

In this instance the Otho manuscript is using an older English word, while the Caligula manuscript is using a synonym recently borrowed from Anglo-Norman. One might think from this example that Otho was copied earlier, but that is not necessarily the case. In other places Otho uses a recent Anglo-Norman borrowing where the Caligula manuscript uses a word from Old English. One such case is the following passage: Caligula uses the older marmon stane where Otho uses the Anglo-Norman form with the later plural inflection marbre stones. The original version, which is lost, undoubtedly used the older Old English forms in both these cases. The two manuscripts are an example of the language changing “in real time,” and it’s a haphazard and uneven process where the scribes are not being consistent in which forms they choose.

(The names Otho and Caligula seem odd to the uninitiated. Robert Cotton, whose library formed the core of the British Library’s manuscript collection, housed his manuscripts in presses topped with busts of Roman emperors, and the manuscript shelf marks retain this designation to this day.)

The form boundary doesn’t make its appearance until the Early Modern era. Here’s an example from the appropriately named John Manwood’s 1592 A Brefe Collection of the Lawes of the Forest:

Some do make this definition of a forest, vz, a forest is a teritory of grounde, meered and bounded with vnremoueable markes, méeres and boundaries, ether knowen by matter of recorde, or else by prescription. This is no perfect definition of a Forest, neitheir, because it doth not concist Ex genere & vera differentia: for by this definition Westminster Hall may be a Forest.

Also borrowed from Anglo-Norman, mete makes its English appearance about a century later in the 1401 poem “The Reply of Friar Daw Topias,” only here it represents a metaphorical, rather than a physical, boundary:

Thou jawdewyne, thow jangeler,
how stande this togider,
by verré contradiccion
Thou concludist thi silf,
and bryngest thee to the mete
there I wolde have thee.

(You jester, you idle talker,
how does this make sense?
by true contradiction
You disprove yourself
and bring you to the mete
there I would have you.)

Here mete is being used in its original sense of a point or position, a target or mark. Like the original meaning of bound, it could be used to refer to a boundary marker.

The phrasing metes and bounds is in place by 1473 when printer William Caxton uses it in his translation of Raoul Léfevre’s history of Troy:

After they had seen the batayll of kynge antheon difrenged and broken they myght not lifte vp their armes to dyffend them but were slayn a lityll and a lityll. And fynably they were brought to so strayte metes and boundes that they wiste neuer where to saue hem. And than they fledd out of the place sparklid by the feldes & champayns.

(After they had seen the battalions of King Antheon destroyed and broken they would not lift up their arms to defend themselves but were slain little by little. And finally, they were brought to such constricted metes and bounds that did not now where to go to save themselves. And then they fled out of that place, scattered about the fields and plains.)

What we have here is a very old term that survives, in fossilized form, in legal jargon. This is not at all unusual; jargon of various professions often contains words or senses of words that are otherwise obsolete.

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Sources:

Anglo-Norman Dictionary, AND2 phase 3, 2008–12, s.v. mete1; AND2 phase 2, 2000–06, bounde1.

Brook, G. L. and Roy Francis Leslie, eds. Laȝamon: Brut. Early English Text Society 250. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1963, lines 658–62, 34–35. London, British Library, MS Cotton Caligula A 1x and Cotton Otho C Xiii. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Garner, Bryan, ed. Black’s Law Dictionary, 11th edition, 2019, s.v. metes and bounds. Thomson Reuters: Westlaw.

Léfevre, Raoul. Here Begynneth the Volume Intituled and Named the Recuyell of the Historyes of Troye. William Caxton, trans. Bruges: William Caxton, 1473, leaf 181r-v. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Manwood, John. A Brefe Collection of the Lawes of the Forest. London: 1592, 138. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Middle English Dictionary, 2019, s.v. mete, n.(2), bound(e, n., woning(e ger.(1), marble, n.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, December 2001, s.v. mete, n.1; second edition, 1989, s.v. bound, n.1, boundary, n.

Wright, Thomas. “The Reply of Friar Daw Topias, With Jack Upland’s Rejoinder” (1401). Political Poems and Songs Relating to English History, vol. 2 of 2. London: Longman, Green, Longman, and Roberts, 1861, 86–87. Oxford, Bodleian MS Digby 41, fol. 2r. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Photo credit: Unknown photographer, 1913. Public domain image.

jerky

Strips of jerky, presumably beef

5 March 2021

A favorite of college students and those who are suffering late-night munchies, jerky is cured meat, especially beef, usually served in long, thin strips. The word, but not the method of preparation, shares an origin with the Jamaican dish of jerked meat. It is etymologically unrelated to the verb and epithet jerk (Cf. jerk).

Jerky comes into English from the Spanish charqui, which in turn took it from the Quechua, a native language of the Andean region of South America. In that language ch’arki means dried meat. Charqui makes its English appearance in a 1604 translation of José de Acosta’s The Naturall and Morall Historie of the East and West Indies. Acosta writes of the natives of the Andes, as translated by Edward Grimeston:

Of the flesh of these sheepe they make Cuschargui, or dried flesh, the which will last very long, whereof they make great accompt.

The form charqui continues in English use to the present day but mainly in reference to dried meat from the Andean region. For example, it appears in Charles Darwin’s journal for August 1834 when he was in Chile during his voyage as a naturalist on HMS Beagle:

They scarcely ever taste meat; as, with the twelve pounds per annum, they have to clothe themselves, and support their families. The miners who work in the min itself, have twenty-five shillings per month, and are allowed a little charqui.

The Spanish spread the word charqui throughout the Americas, and it made its way to the Caribbean and beyond. John Smith, writing of Virginia in 1612 uses the form jerkin for the cured meat:

Their fish and flesh they boyle either very tenderly, or broyle it so long on hurdles over the fire, or else after the Spanish fashion, putting it on a spit, they turne first the one side, then the other, til it be as drie as their ierkin beefe in the west Indies, that they may keepe it a month or more without putrifying.

And the form jerked, spelled girked, appears later in seventeenth century. Here is William Hughes writing about potatoes in his 1672 The American Physitian, which, despite what one may expect from the title, is a book about botany:

They are easie of digestion, agreeing well with all bodies, especially with our hot stomacks when we come there, who may at first eat of them moderately, four or five times a day, without hurt, (as also of some kinde of meat or flesh:) they breed very good nourishment; they corroborate or strengthen exceedingly; they chear the heart, and are provocative of bodily lust. They are used several ways, as I have often eaten them; either roasted under the ashes, and then peeled, pulp't and buttred, or boiled and buttred, or eaten alone, or with Girk't Beef and Pork instead of bread.

Finally, we get the familiar form of jerky by the mid nineteenth century. From Walter Colton’s 1850 Three Years in California:

My companions returned, and seating ourselves on the ground, each with a tin cup of coffee, a junk [sic] of bread, and a piece of the stewed jerky, our dinner was soon dispatched, and with a relish which the epicure never yet felt or fancied.

In nineteenth-century Jamaica the word was applied to a different kind of culinary preparation. There jerked meat refers to meat that has been marinated in a mixture of seasonings and then smoked or barbequed. The method originated among communities of escaped slaves in the interior of the island. It’s mentioned in Cyrus Williams’s 1826 A Tour Through the Island of Jamaica:

After this, the negroes came in a body and took away as much fish as they pleased, not less than a bushel a-piece, and yet left many on the shore. Some were hung up to dry and others were salted. The negroes carry them into the interior, and exchange them for jerked hog, on their own account.

There you have it, the history of colonial exploitation of and slavery in the Americas encapsulated in a single word.

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Sources:

Acosta, José de. The Naturall and Morall Historie of the East and West Indies. Edward Grimeston, trans. London: Val Sims for Edward Blount and William Aspley, 1604, 320. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Colton, Walter. Three Years in California. New York: A. S. Barnes, 1850, 298. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Darwin, Charles, P. Parker King, and Robert Fitz-Roy. Narrative of the Surveying Voyages of His Majesty’s Ships Adventure and Beagle, vol. 3 of 3. London: Henry Colburn, 1839, 317–18. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Hughes, William. The American Physitian, or a Treatise of the Roots, Plants, Trees, Shrubs, Fruit, Herbs, &c Growing in the English Plantations in America. London: J.C. for William Crook, 1672, 14–15. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, June 2019, s.v. charqui, n., jerked, adj.2, jerk, v.2, jerky, n.2, jerkin, adj. and n.2.

Smith, John. A Map of Virginia, With a Description of the Countrey. Oxford: Joseph Barnes, 1612, 17. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Williams, Cyrus R. A Tour Through the Island of Jamaica. London: Hunt and Clarke, 1826, 80. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Photo credit: Larry Jacobsen, 2011, licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.

jerkwater

The ironically named No Agua water stop on the Denver & Rio Grande railroad line near No Agua, New Mexico; photo of a 10,000-gallon water tank with a flatbed railroad car in front of it, a building with a sign reading “No Agua” is in the background

4 March 2021

The adjective jerkwater denotes something small or insignificant, and it’s often found in the phrase jerkwater town. The word comes from the idea of a small town where a stagecoach would only stop because it affords the chance to water the horses, and in later use it would extend to railroad lines. But why exactly jerk was chosen as the first element is uncertain. It may come from strategically placed water tanks along the stage and later rail line where one could pull on a chain to begin the flow of water, or it could be from the idea of pulling water from a stream or trough in buckets. (Cf. jerk). https://www.wordorigins.org/big-list-entries/jerk-jerk-off

We see jerkwater applied to a small stagecoach line as early as 1852. From the Miami County Sentinel of Peru, Indiana:

Here [i.e., Stillwater, Minnesota] they are building the Penitentiary and there is the land office and there come the steamboats, either on their way up or down the Mississippi; and although you might contrive to go across in a sort of jerk water stage, from Stillwater to St. Paul, by land, you will probably prefer to around in the boat.

And by a decade later, the term had transferred over to railroad lines. From the Morgan County Gazette of Martinsville, Indiana of 19 September 1863:

We hear it again rumored that an attempt is to be made to revive the old “jerk-water” railroad from here to Franklin. We haven’t much faith in the project.

And jerkwater generalized to refer to anything small or provincial by the end of the next decade. From an article in the Indianapolis paper The People of 6 January 1877. It is in reference to a paper named The Sentinel, but which one I am unable to determine. It could be the aforementioned Miami Country Sentinel or the Fort Wayne Sentinel or another paper:

As a sample of this jerk-water editorial lunatic’s stuff, which he doles out to his nauseated patrons, just gaze on this.

 The early uses I cite here are all from Indiana, and the term could very well have started as a regionalism in that state. But the Dictionary of American Regional English’s surveys give it a wider range in the latter half of the twentieth century. It’s found across the northern and western United States, from western New York state and Pennsylvania to California. It’s missing in New England and the South and Southwest, being found only as far south as Maryland and West Virginia.

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Sources:

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

Green’s Dictionary of Slang, 2021, jerkwater, adj.

“Minnesota.” Miami County Sentinel (Peru, Indiana), 6 May 1852, 1. NewspaperArchive.com.

Morgan County Gazette (Martinsville, Indiana), 19 September 1863, 4. NewspaperArchive.com.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, June 2019, s.v. jerkwater, adj. and n.

“Where Will Greeley Republicans Go Now?” The People (Indianapolis), 6 January 1877, 3. NewspaperArchive.com.

Photo credit: James St. John, 24 July 2009, used under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.

jerk / jerk-off

A soda jerk flipping ice cream into a malted milk shake, Corpus Christi, Texas, 1939; black-and-white photo of a man in a white uniform flipping a scoop of ice cream into a mixing cup

3 March 2021

Jerk has many meanings, but most stem from an echoic verb meaning to make a sharp movement. From there, it would generalize into any sharp movement, especially a pull or tug. To pull a beverage from a tap would give rise to the soda jerk, and tugging on a man’s penis would spawn jerk-off, which would be clipped and bowdlerized to refer to a contemptible person.

The verb to jerk makes its appearance in the early fifteenth century. It starts out as shoemaking jargon meaning to stitch tightly, undoubtedly from sharp tugging on the threads. It appears in an agreed list of prices promulgated by the cordwainer’s guild in York, England, c. 1430. The entry is Latin, except for the word yerked or jerked:

Item, pro sutura xij parium sotularum yerkyd ad manum, iiij d.

(Item, for stitching 12 pairs of shoes, jerked by hand, 4 d.)

From the sixteenth into the eighteenth century when the sense became obsolete, to jerk could mean to strike, especially with a rod or whip. From a 1550 religious tract, A Spyrytuall and Moost Precyouse Pearle:

Fyrst he teacheth vs hys wyll thorowe the preachynge of hys word, and gyuyth vs warnyng. Now, if so be, that we wyll not folow hym, than he beateth and gierketh vs a lytle wyth a rodde, as some tyme wyth pouerty, some tyme wyth sycknes and dyseasys or with other afflyccyons, whych shoulde be namyd & estemyd as nothyng els, but chylderns roddys or the wandys of correccyon.

(First he teaches us his will through the preaching of his word and gives us warning. Now, if it happens that we will not follow him, then he beats and jerks us a little with a rod, sometimes with poverty, sometimes with sickness and diseases or with other afflictions, which should be named and esteemed as nothing else but children’s rods or the wands of correction.)

The sense of any tug or sharp movement, not just one at the shoemaker’s last, was in place by the late sixteenth century. From a 1582 translation of Robert Parsons’s An Epistle of the Persecution of Catholickes in Englande:

Yet forsoothe he geueth vs fayre woords, & will nedes beare vs on hand that he will support vs with his faithfull assista[n]ce. And thereupo[n] he steppeth furth, and vp he Ierketh his hands, & white of his eyes to heaue[n] ward, (as his maner is) and (full deuoutlye lyke a good man) he there vndertaketh the defense of the cause: but of what cause I pray yow? forsoothe euen of that same cause, which before (like an apostata) he had betrayed and forsaken, and made his bragge thereof when he had so done.

(Yet truly he gives us fair words, and will, if necessary, profess to us that he will support us with his faithful assistance. And thereupon he steps forth, and he jerks his hands upward, & the white of his eyes heavenward (as is his manner), and (very devoutly like a good man) he there undertakes the defense of the cause: but of what cause, I pray you? Truly, even of that same cause, which before (like an apostate) he had betrayed and forsaken, and boasted thereof when he had done so.)

To jerk-off, meaning to masturbate, especially by a man, is in place by the mid nineteenth century, the added off referring to completion of the act by ejaculation. It’s recorded in an 1865 book titled Love Feast by a writer with the nom de plume of Philocomus (literally “love of merry-making”):

I'll jerk off, thinking of thee.

The adjective jerk-off, referring to something that is contemptible, was in place by the 1930s, but is likely older—slang senses can rarely be dated exactly, as they are in oral use for some time before seeing print, especially overtly sexual ones, which editors and publishers tend to censor. It appears in a 1 March 1937 letter by humorist and screenwriter S. J. Perelman:

We stayed in town most of the summer after I saw you, working away on that jerk-off musical and hating it more and more; finally finished it and sawed ourselves off around the first week last August.

Jerk, meaning a contemptible person, is recorded a few years earlier than the contemptible sense of jerk-off, but it is likely a clipping of the latter. In this case the epithet jerk appears in Henry Roth’s 1934 novel Call it Sleep:

Jerk I shidda said. Cha!

And it’s recorded in Albin Pollock’s 1935 dictionary of criminal slang:

Jerk, a boob; chump; a sucker.

The sense of jerk meaning to dispense drinks, from the pulling motion needed to operate a beer or soda tap, also appears in the mid eighteenth century. It originally started as a term for dispensing beer, as seen in this article with a dateline of 17 February 1868. Here frail means morally weak, subject to temptation:

After the successful raids on the gamblers, the “beer jerkers” cam in for their share of persecution, and for a time the frail priestess of Bacchus seemed extinguished. But Molly Fitzgerald and Co. have instituted a new firm with new goods, and opened a beer-jerking saloon on Fourth street. The officers promptly made arrests, and continued to do so. Molly, who is Queen of the beer-jerks, had the officers arrested for assault. The jury fined them each $100  and costs. And yesterday a highly intelligent jury decided that Molly Fitzgerald & Co. owned the saloon, and had the right to jerk beer to their heart’s desire. If this decision be sustained we will soon be again cursed with beer-jerking saloons that will be the resorts of thieves and the lowest grades of frail women.

But by the 1880s the verb to jerk was being used to refer to dispensing soft drinks. From the 1883 The Grocery Man and Peck’s Bad Boy, in which the bad boy of the title says:

Well, I must go down to the sweetened wind factory, and jerk soda.

And a bit later on in a conversation with the grocery man:

Well, I have quit jerking soda.

“No you don’t tell me,” said the grocery man as he moved the box of raisins out of reach.” You’ll never amout [sic] to anything unless you stick to one trade or profession. A rolling hen never catches the early angleworm.”

“O, but I am all right now. In the soda water business, there’s no chance for genius to rise unless the soda fountain explodes. It is all wind, and one gets tired of the constant fizz. He feels that he is a fraud, and when he puts a little syrup in a tumbler, and fires a little, sweetened wind and water in it until the soap suds fills the tumbler, and charges ten cents for that which only costs a cent, a sensitive soda jerker, who has reformed, feels that it is worse than three card monte.

That’s how a medieval shoemaking jargon term came to mean a server of beverages, an unpleasant person, or an act of masturbation.

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Sources:

“From St. Louis” (17 February 1868). Davenport Gazette (Iowa), 22 February 1868, 1. NewspaperArchive.com.

Green’s Dictionary of Slang, 2021, s.v. jerk off, v., jerk, n.1.

Middle English Dictionary, 2019, s.v. yerkid, ppl.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, June 2019, s.v. yark, v.2, jerk, v.1, jerking, n.1, jerk, n.1 and adj.2, jerk-off, n. and adj.

Parsons, Robert. An Epistle of the Persecution of Catholickes in Englande. G.T., trans. Rouen: Fr. Parson’s Press, 1582, 124. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Peck, George W. The Grocery Man and Peck’s Bad Boy (Peck’s Bad Boy, No. 2). Chicago: Belford, Clarke & Co., 1883, 126, 136–37. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Perelman, S. J. “Letter to I. J. Kapstein” (1 March 1937). Don’t Tread on Me: The Selected Letters of S. J. Perelman. Prudence Crowther, ed. New York: Viking, 1987, 11. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Pollock, Albin J. The Underworld Speaks. San Francisco: Prevent Crime Bureau, 1935. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Werdmüller, Otto. A Spyrytuall and Moost Precyouse Pearle. London: S. Mierdman for Gwalter Lynne, 1550, fol. 13v. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

York Memorandum Book, part 1 of 3. Publications of the Surtees Society, 120. York: Andrews and Co., 1912, 194. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Photo credit: Russell Lee, February 1939, Library of Congress. U.S. government photo, public domain image.

jeep

General Dwight Eisenhower in a jeep in Normandy, summer 1944. The lieutenant general in the backseat appears to be Omar Bradley. Black and white image of three soldiers in a jeep with a soldier in the foreground engaging them in conversation.

2 March 2021

Jeep is a brand of sports utility vehicles currently owned by the Chrysler Corporation, and the brand has its origin in a quarter-ton, light truck used by the U.S. and Allied militaries during World War II. But the origin of the name Jeep causes confusion among some, although the origin is clear for those who delve into the vehicle’s history.

While the light truck is the most famous jeep, it is by no means the first thing to bear that name. In its early years, jeep was applied to all sorts of vehicles, aircraft, and odd devices. It even had a short life as a slang term for slow-witted person.

The name comes from a character in E. C. Segar’s comic strip Thimble Theater; the strip is better known for its lead character Popeye the Sailor. The character, Eugene the Jeep, is a dog-like creature of mysterious origin and possessing supernatural abilities. His name comes from only sound he emits, “jeep.” Eugene the Jeep is first mentioned in the strip on 16 March 1936 with a notice that he is on his way. But readers get the first look at him on 1 April 1936 when Olive Oyl opens the shipping crate in which he had arrived.

Thimble Theater comic strip from 1 April 1936, featuring Popeye, Olive Oyl, and family watch Eugene the Jeep come out of his shipping crate; Eugene is a spotted quadruped who utters the sound “jeep”

Almost immediately, jeep was applied to vehicles and devices that are exceptional, operate mysteriously, or are just odd. One of the first to do so was barnstormer Art Chester who dubbed one of his racing planes the Jeep. A photo of Chester in his aircraft appears in the 1936 publication Flying for 1937 with the caption:

BEHOLD THE JEEP!
Art Chester and his special Menasco-powered racer.

Multiple U. S. Army Air Corps aircraft of the late 1930s were nicknamed Jeep, including the famed B-17 Flying Fortress bomber. The Air Corps News Letter of 1 January 1938 included this note from Langley Field, Virginia:

A few interesting facts regarding the “Flying Fortresses” may here be recorded. The first B-17 was delivered at Seattle, Wash., on March 1, 1937, and the twelfth and last B-17 on July 26, 1937.

Since delivery of the first article, the “Jeeps”* have flown 679,000 miles, or over 27 times around the world, or the equivalent of 141 1/2 full twenty-four hour days in the air.

The note on the nickname reads:

*Note: We enter here a mild protest against the application by the Langley Field Correspondent of the term “Jeeps” to the B-17’s. Firstly, that term is not befitting an airplane of this type. Why not let the term “Flying Fortress” suffice? Secondly, the autogyro has prior claim to the appellation of “Jeeps;” so let us be consistent.

The nickname for the autogiro is documented in the Air Corps News Letter on 15 June 1938 in a poem written about the aircraft by one of its mechanics:

A ride in a Jeep on a hot summer day,
Is like a mint julep, or so they say,
The fan on the top is to keep you cool,
Now doesn’t that make you warm people drool.

For those unfamiliar with them, an autogiro resembles a helicopter, although unlike a helicopter the overhead rotor is unpowered and thrust is provided by a standard airplane engine. Because they require air flowing across the rotor to generate lift, autogiros are not capable of vertical take-off or hovering unless there is a strong headwind.

Aircraft were not the only jeeps. Devices to shoot them down were also so dubbed. One of Eugene the Jeep’s abilities was prognostication, and range finders on anti-aircraft guns were also called jeeps. From Science Digest of June 1940:

The predictor is so called because it predicts the planes’ position so as to allow for the distance covered between the time of firing and the explosions of the shells several seconds later. Service men call it the “Jeep.”

Jeep was not just applied to strange things; it was also applied to strange people, particularly those of low intelligence, or simply the inexperienced. From a story in the Saturday Evening Post of 16 July 1938:

The Broadway store of the McCutcheon drug chain is the patsy of the bunch. Sounds as if it ought to be the cream, but all you get is late hours and no tips. After eleven at night, the place is full of cheap horse players and chiselers and show people out of a job and queer ones. The supervisor always ships the worst of the boys there—the ones like Greg, the good workers that get in wrong by jawing at a customer, and also the jeeps, which is what we call fellows who try hard, but are naturally slow

And with U. S. entry into World War II in the offing, new recruits into the Army were also dubbed jeeps. From William Baumer’s 1941 book He’s in the Army Now, meant to show civilians what life in the military would be like:

Up the road the new soldiers march in a long straggling line. Some try to keep step, and finding that even with cooperation from others it is not easy, give it up and with heads down cross the highway. A dust-colored truck passes the column and its cargo of soldiers yell, "Hey, Jeep.” Then in a chorus there is the repeated cry, “Jeep! Jeep! Oh, Jeep!"

The line of men recognize the recruit tag. One of the soldiers with the column yells reassuringly, “They were probably jeeps themselves last week. Never mind them. You won't be a jeep for long.”

And Kendall and Viney’s 1941 Dictionary of Army and Navy Slang has the adjective jeepy:

Jeep . . . . reconnaissance truck, also known as a jitterbug.
Jeepville . . . . recruit center. In some camps a jeep is a rookie.
he’s jeepy . . . . not quite all there.

As you can see, that glossary also uses jeep to refer to the light truck, and 1941 is the year that the familiar vehicle gets the nickname. But it’s not the first U. S. Army vehicle to be so nicknamed. Tanks were also called jeeps, as seen in this 31 July 1938 New York Times article:

Take a ride in one of the tanks and you’ll see why the men of the brigade call them hell buggies, wombats, jeep wagons or man-killers. They are literally man-killers. Not only do these nine-and-one-half-ton monsters jerk and jar and vibrate, shaking all who ride them from nose to crupper; not only do their rubber, steel-blocked tracks, running over idlers and bogeys, clang and clatter; not do their 250-horsepower engines roar a deafening din; not only do wind and dust and twigs and leaves strike at your head, whip at your eyes—but the tanks do kill.

And this brief mention in the November 1940 Builder’s Review uses jeep to refer to a large truck pulling a trailer:

The “Jeep”, new 5-ton military tractor, can climb a 40-per-cent grade, ford a stream 40 inches deep and turn on a 20-foot radius.

The nickname jeep for the familiar light truck entered into the public consciousness on 20 February 1941 when a publicity stunt featured a Senator and a Representative driving a jeep up the steps of the U.S. Capitol. An Associated Press photo of the event was published in newspapers nationwide. The one in the New York Daily News was accompanied by this text:

JEEP CREEPS
—Up Capitol Steps

CONGRESSIONAL ROUGH RIDERS
Undaunted, Senator James M. Mead takes chances and drives one of the Army’s new light trucks, known as “Jeep” up Capitol steps in demonstration. With him is Representative J. Parnell Thomas. Sergeants in back seat seem confident of outcome.

The nickname stuck, and the ubiquity of the quarter-ton vehicle—some 640,000 were produced during the war, serving in most of the Allied armies—drove the other senses of jeep out of the vocabulary.

It’s commonly thought that jeep is a pronunciation of the initials GP which were printed on the quarter-ton trucks, thought by many to stand for general purpose. Some of the jeeps manufactured during the war did bear those initials, but that explanation is incorrect on several counts. First, the G was a Ford Motor Company factory designation for a government vehicle, and the P was code for an 80-inch wheelbase. Second, as we have seen, jeep was a common slang term for vehicles of all sorts well before the familiar quarter-ton trucks entered into production. But it’s easy to see how such a false explanation could arise. A soldier learning that it was called a jeep and then seeing the initials GP on it, might very well assume the two were connected and conjecture that the initials stood for general purpose.

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Sources:

Baldwin, Hanson W. “It’s ‘Jine the Cavalry!’: and Ride a Hell Buggy.” New York Times Magazine, 31 July 1938, 5.. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

Barry, Jerome. “The Jeep.” The Saturday Evening Post, 16 July 1938, 16. EBSCOhost Academic Search Ultimate.

Baumer, William H. “‘Jeep’ Life at the Reception Center.” He’s in the Army Now. New York: Robert M. McBride, 1941, 11. HathTrust Digital Archive.

Builder’s Review, November 1940, 51. HathTrust Digital Archive.

Daily News (New York), 20 February 1941, 30. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

“The Giro.” Air Corps News Letter, 21.12, 15 June 1938, 9. HathTrust Digital Archive.

Green’s Dictionary of Slang, 2021, s.v. jeep, n.1.

Kendall, Park and Johnny Viney. A Dictionary of Army and Navy Slang. New York: M.S. Mill, 1941. HathTrust Digital Archive.

Mingos, Howard. Photo caption. Flying for 1937. New York: Aeronautical Chamber of Commerce, 1936, 106.

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. jeep, n.

Peck, James L. H. “Defense Against Air Attack.” Science Digest, 7.6, June 1940, 6. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

“Performances of B-17’s Evoke Enthusiasm.” Air Corps News Letter, 21.1, 1 January 1938, 7. HathTrust Digital Archive.

Image credits: U.S. Army Signal Corps, 1944, public domain image; E. C. Segar, King Features Syndicate, 1 April 1936. Fair use of a copyrighted image to illustrate a point under discussion.