jump the shark

Fonzie during his attempt to jump the shark. This still photo from a 1977 episode of the TV series Happy Days depicts actor Henry Winkler on water skis and wearing a leather jacket and bathing suit.

15 March 2021

Jumping the shark is a moment of peak popularity or quality, after which there is an inevitable decline. Originally applied to television series, the concept has since extended into other realms. The phrase refers to an episode of the television show Happy Days that aired on 20 September 1977 in which the character Fonzie, played by Henry Winkler, on water skis jumps over a shark. The series continued for another seven years, but many consider this to be the show’s high point.

But the Fonz was not the first to literally jump a shark. The Happy Days episode was inspired by an attempt by daredevil motorcyclist Evel Knievel to jump a tank filled with twelve sharks. The attempt was scheduled for 31 January 1977, and on 8 December 1976 Variety ran the following:

Jump The Shark

Hollywood, Dec. 7

Producer-director Marty Pasetta has signed Evel Knievel to a five-year contract for exclusive daredevilling on tv specials.

Initial project will be 90-minute “Evel Knievel’s Death Defiers” to air Jan. 31 on CBS from the Chicago Amphitheatre. Knievel promises to jump his motorcycle over an indoor pool stocked with 12 killer sharks.

Mike Seligman coproduces.

Advertisement for the 31 January 1977 TV special Evel Knieval’s Death Defiers. Sensationalist drawing of a motorcyclist leaping over two sharks; in the background are a man on an exploding chair and a man making a high dive off a platform.

And a TV listing in the Calgary Herald on the air date read as follows:

(12)—Special: Evel Knievel’s Death Defiers: Telly Savalas and Jill St. John host a variety of daredevils. 1. Evel attempts to jump the shark pool. 2. 72-year-old Karl Wallenda will walk the tight rope. 3. Orville Kisselberg will blow himself up. 4. Joe Gerlach will dive 90 feet into a sponge.

But the stunt was not aired. On a practice run, Knievel easily cleared the shark tank but crashed on landing, severely injuring himself. He gave up stunt riding after that.

Jumping the shark would have remained a literal co-location of three words and a fading tidbit of 70s nostalgia if it were not for Jon Hein, who in December 1997 launched the web site jumptheshark.com. The site, which no longer exists (the URL redirects to the TV Guide site), defined jumping the shark as:

It's a moment. A defining moment when you know that your favorite television program has reached its peak. That instant that you know from now on...it's all downhill. Some call it the climax. We call it jumping the shark.  From that moment on, the program will simply never be the same.

And Hein said of the inspiration for the site:

The term "jump the shark" was coined by my college roommate for 4 years, Sean J. Connolly, in Ann Arbor, Michigan back in 1985. This web site, book, film, and all other material surrounding shark jumping, are hereby dedicated to "the Colonel."

The aforementioned expression refers to the telltale sign of the demise of Happy Days, our favorite example, when Fonzie actually "jumped the shark." The rest is history.

Jumping the shark applies not only to TV, but also music, film, even everyday life. "Did you see her boyfriend? She definitely jumped the shark." You get the idea.

There is no independent evidence to validate the 1985 date, but there is no reason to doubt Hein’s account.

The phrase jump the shark made its mainstream media debut in the Los Angeles Times on 9 April 1998 in an article about the television show South Park:

If you think the show’s already passed its peak, be sure to vote for it at “Jump the Shark” (http://www.jumptheshark.com), a site that pinpoints the moment of each TV show’s decline. The name comes from the “Happy Days” show where Fonzie jumped a shark tank. Other such points of no return include Farrah leaving “Charlie’s Angels,” and the stars of “Blossom” and “Wonder Years” reaching puberty.

Has “SP” “jumped the shark” with its April Fools’ episode? Only time and ratings will tell.

The phrase has generalized to other genres and aspects of life. For instance, the Financial Times ran this in an article on Formula One racing on 14 July 2001:

Formula One has jumped the shark and consequently I will not be going near the British Grand Prix at Silverstone this weekend. Since last year when I kicked the habit and no longer spent Sunday afternoons watching grands prix, I have regressed a little; the internecine fighting of the Schumacher brothers has dragged me off the wagon.

Despite the duelling Germans, I’m still largely ambivalent about F1. It’s not just the stultifying nature of most races. It is the inherent tackiness of the sport and its reluctance to say no to anything that might hinder the chances of getting the sponsors’ message in front of as many people as possible that turns me off.

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Sources:

Glaser, Mark. “Love ‘Em or Hate ‘Em, ‘South Park’ and Its Antics Set the Web Abuzz.” Los Angeles Times, 9 April 1998, 48. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

Harvey, Michael. “Why F1 Is Not Up to Speed.” Financial Times (London), 14 July 2001, 18. Gale Primary Sources: Financial Times.

Internet Archive. jumptheshark.com (5 December 1998).

“Jump the Shark.” Variety, 8 December 1976. ProQuest Magazines.

Oxford English Dictionary, draft additions March 2006, s.v. jump v.

TV Listings. Calgary Herald (Alberta), 28 January 1977, 27. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

Photo credit: Happy Days: Henderson Productions, 1977, fair use of a still from the television show Happy Days to illustrate the topic under discussion. Evel Knieval’s Death Defiers: imdb.com.

Joneses, keeping up with the

12 March 2021

Two early examples (the first?) of the Keeping Up with the Joneses comic strip that ran in different editions of the Omaha World-Herald on 7 April 1913. The first depicts a husband getting an emergency phone call from his wife and rushing home, only to find she wants to hire a cook because the Joneses next door have one. The second depicts the same man buying a cuckoo clock, only to have his wife throw it away because the Joneses would think it too ordinary.

The phrase to keep up with the Joneses refers to maintaining social status and conspicuous material consumption equal to one’s peers or neighbors. The phrase is one of the few where we can pin down the exact origin. It comes from the name of a newspaper comic strip, Keeping Up with the Joneses by Arthur “Pop” Momand, that ran from 1913 to 1938.

Wikipedia gives a first publication date for the comic strip of 31 March 1913. The Oxford English Dictionary gives 1 April 1913 as its first citation. And the earliest digitized examples I have found are from 7 April 1913. The multiplicity of dates is not unusual, as syndicated comic strips are not always printed on the same day, the publication dates varying from paper to paper.

The phrase quickly entered into the American vocabulary. The earliest example not connected to the comic strip that I have found is in a misogynistic letter printed in the New-York Tribune on 7 December 1913 that argued against women’s suffrage and that a woman’s role was to stay at home and have babies:

My dear Mr. Beerbower, please take another look around you, and you will agree with me that, as a rule, where the women have plenty and live in idleness there are few or no children and where the women live in want and work hard there is a large flock of them. Should that not indicate that my assertion is right and you are wrong when you say, “Self-respecting women who are worth to become mothers,” etc. How many a man is not driven to the wall because his wife wants to keep it up with the Joneses!

Another less offensive use appears the next year in the Washington Bee, a Black newspaper in the District of Columbia. From the 7 March 1914 issue:

Still there were new found friends to step into the breach made by the departure of previous friends who had grown wise to exigencies. Still his fawning flattery, his outward appearing sincerity his insidious form of bribery in the shape of social teas, the tender in dainty cut glass receptacles of the “red, red wine,” attracting new moths to the flame that was sure to singe—still attracted some who hankered to be in “society” just in order to be “keeping up with the Joneses.”

While Pop Momand’s comic strip is largely forgotten, the phrase lives on.

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Sources:

Mohr, George W. “Duties of Two Sexes Different” (30 November 1913). New-York Tribune, 7 December 1913, B10. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. keep, v.

Tyler, Ralph W (as R.W.T.). “Picture for Youth.” Washington Bee (District of Columbia), 7 March 1914, 1. NewsBank: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Image credits: Arthur “Pop” Momand, 1913. From the Omaha World-Herald and the Omaha Evening World-Herald for 7 April 1913, 9 & 10. 

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.