John Bull

WWI British recruiting poster featuring John Bull. A paunchy, white man in a top hat and Victorian dress with a Union Jack waistcoat points at the reader, and words on the poster ask, “Who’s Absent? Is it you?” Soldiers in khaki uniforms stand in the background along with group of buildings on fire.

11 March 2021

John Bull is the personification of the English nation, and sometimes more broadly, all of Britain. He is to England what Uncle Sam is to the United States. But unlike his American counterpart, we can pin down the origin of John Bull with precision.

He was created by satirist John Arbuthnot in a series of pamphlets published in 1712 that present an allegory of the War of Spanish Succession as a lawsuit. The first of these pamphlets is The Law Is a Bottomless Pit, which has John Bull (England) suing Lewis Baboon (France) over the estate of Lord Strutt (Spain):

It is widely observed by a great Philosopher, That Habit is a second Nature: This was verify’d in the Case of John Bull, who from an honest and plain Tradesman, had got such a haunt about the Courts of Justice and such a Jargon of Law-words, that he concluded himself as able a Lawyer, as any that pleaded at the Bar or sat on the Bench.

The pamphlets were exceedingly popular, and references to them and to the character of John Bull can be found regularly in the ensuing decades. And by mid-century people were using John Bull to refer to England outside the context of Arbuthnot’s satire. For instance, in a 26 March 1748 letter, philosopher David Hume, writing from Koblenz in what is now Germany, criticizes the prejudices and provinciality of England:

Tis of this Country, Mr Addison speaks when he calls the People Nations of Slaves, by Tyranny debas'd: Their Makers Image more than half defacd. And he adds that the Soldiers were Hourly instructed, as they urge their Toyl, To prize their Queen & love their native Soil. If any Foot Soldier cou'd have more ridiculous national Prejudices than the Poet, I shou'd be much surpriz'd. Be assurd, there is not a finer Country in the World; nor are there any Signs of Poverty among the People. But John Bull's Prejudices are ridiculous; as his Insolence is intolerable.

In drawings, John Bull has been typically portrayed as a paunchy, middle-aged, white man in middle-class attire: a blue tailcoat, waistcoat, and shallow-crowned top hat. The color of the waistcoat has changed over the years, originally buff-colored, it shifted to red in the Georgian era, and since the twentieth century has usually had a Union Jack pattern. He epitomizes the ideal of a prosperous, middle-class Englishman.

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Sources:

Arbuthnot, John. The Law Is a Bottomless Pit. Exemplified in the Case of Lord Strutt, John Bull, Nicholas Frog, and Lewis Baboon. London: John Morphew, 1712, 8. Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO).

Hume, David. “Letter 64” (26 March 1748). The Letters of David Hume, vol. 1 of 2. J. Y. T. Greig, ed. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1932, 121. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, June 2019, s.v. John Bull, n.

Image credit: 1915, Parliamentary Recruiting Committee, Andrew Reid and Co. Public domain image.

jody

1-minute video of Sound Off or the Duckworth chant, recorded at Ft. Slocum, New York in 1945. Jody makes his appearance toward the end of the clip.

10 March 2021

In the American military a jody or jody call is a marching or running cadence. Such marching cadences have been around for as long as soldiers have gone off to war, but the term jody dates to the mid twentieth century. Their lyrics cover a wide variety of topics, but the archetype is about a civilian named Jody who has stolen the soldier’s girl-back-home. Jody dates to World War II in military use, but it has roots in Black slang from slightly earlier.

Jody is a blend of the phrase Joe the Grinder, the name of the seducer. Joe is obviously a generic, male name, and the verb to grind has been slang meaning to copulate from the sixteenth century through to the present day.

The name Joe the Grinder is first recorded in 1939 in a blues song sung by Irvin “Gar Mouth” Lowry of Varner, Arkansas. But in Lowry’s song, it is the singer who identifies himself as Joe the Grinder; he is the wronged man, not the seducer. He is working away from home, perhaps in prison, although that’s not stated, and his girlfriend has left him. The roles may be reversed, but the song’s lyrics has all the elements of a military jody:

O They call me Joe the Grinder, O baby
[...]
Yes sir, poor boys along, a long way from home
Yes, I have nowhere to go, I have nowhere to go, man
O my baby she quit me, quit me [indistinct]
O my woman she gone, and I hope she will come back to me
O I asked my next-door neighbor where my woman go
O don’t nobody know my woman, don’t know her name

Joe the Grinder makes it into the pages of a major newspaper in 1940. Here it is the context of a prison. From the Atlanta Journal of 14 February 1940 (the irony of it being Valentine’s Day is unstated):

The worst enemy of a man sentenced to prison is “Joe the Grinder,” an ever-lurking psychological pest who haunts the prisoner with fears of losing his wife and home while serving his “stretch” behind the grim, bleak walls.

At some point before 1944 Joe the Grinder made the jump from seducing the wives and girlfriends of prisoners to those of servicemen. Here is a portion of poem submitted to the Black newspaper the New York Amsterdam News by a sailor and published on 9 September 1944:

He heard from her no more (traitor)
She took up with “Joe the Grinder” (double cross).
And forgot the guy in blue (no patriotism).

In making the transition from prison to the military Joe the Grinder was reduced down to Jody, but the full Joe the Grinder hung around in Black civilian slang. Here’s a quip by Black war correspondent Enoc Waters in Australia  reporting from Australia in the Chicago Defender on 20 November 1943:

I overheard some soldiers referring to me as “Jody in an army uniform.”

The appearance of the seducer in marching cadences seems to have happened by 1944. In that year, Willie Lee Duckworth, a Black soldier stationed at Fort Slocum, New York wrote the famous Sound Off marching cadence, which quickly spread throughout the Army. There are many different versions of the lyrics, often incorporating Jody as a character.

Once in the military, Jody broke free of its Black slang origins and was taken up by White soldiers, sailors, and airmen as well. The following passage is from John Beecher’s 1945 book All Brave Sailors about his service on the Liberty ship SS Booker T. Washington. Unusually for a U.S. ship of the era, it was commanded by a Black captain and had a racially mixed crew—Beecher was one of the white officers on board:

"Some guys worry about their wives," Mac says, "about their going out with Jody." (Jody is the mythical character who takes care of seamen's wives and girl friends while they are away. He is pictured wearing the bathrobe, pajamas and bed-room slippers you carefully put away when you left.)

"I guess some have good reason to worry," I say. "Or else they have guilty consciences."

"Jody doesn't bother me," Mac says, "not with the kind of wife I have. But I surely miss her."

Allan Lyon records the lyrics of one of the versions of the Duckworth chant in his 1948 novel about the war, Toward an Unknown Station. The incident portrayed is set in France in 1944:

Rocco sang:

Ain’t no use in going home
Joady’s got your girl and gone
Sound off!
Hup, two
Sound off!
Three, four

Gonna get a three-day pass
Just to kick old Joady’s ass
Sound off!
Hup, two
Sound off!
Three, four ...

“Take a good look, fellows, this is Nancy.”

“Glad to meet you, Nancy.”

“The city of Nancy, you jerk.”

Every time I get a new allotment
Joady gets a new apartment
Sound off!
Hup, two
Sound off!
Three, four ...

Over the years the term jody widened to mean any marching or running cadence, not just ones complaining about civilian seducers back home.

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Sources:

Beecher, John. All Brave Sailors. New York: L. B. Fischer, 1945, 118. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Chequita Cynthia. “Something for the Boys.” New York Amsterdam News, 9 September 1944, 3-B. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

Green’s Dictionary of Slang, 2021, s.v. Jody, n., grind, v.

Lighter, J. E. Random House Dictionary of Historical Slang, vol. 2 of 2. New York: Random House, 1997, s.v. Jody, n., Jody call, n.

Lowry, Irvin. “Joe de Grinder” (audio recording). John A. Lomax, collector. 1939. Library of Congress.

Lyon, Allan. Toward an Unknown Station. New York: Macmillan, 1948, 27–28. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Maurer, David W. “Jody’s Chinese Relations.” American Speech, 57.4, Winter 1982, 304–06. JSTOR.

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. grind, v.1.

Smith, Walter A. “Fear of Losing Wife and Home Termed Convict’s Worst Enemy.” Atlanta Journal, 14 February 1940, 16. NewsBank: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Video credit: U.S. Department of War sound recording, 1945. Public domain. Image of marching soldiers at Fort Slocum, 1945, U.S. Department of War photo. Photo paired with recording by Michael Cavanaugh, 2013, YouTube.

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.