etymological question: "jack shit"

[Laurence Horn]

>
>Larry, while the information you cited in yesterday's post was
>quite interesting, I wonder how you would address the gap in
>time between these examples and the various more recent phrases?
>
>Jesse Sheidlower

I agree that it's hard to know for sure.  One problem is that neither
"jack" (on the relevant reading) nor "jackshit" are the type of items
for which there tends to be a lot of documentation outside of slang
dictionaries--or even sometimes inside them.  I was surprised to
discover that while the RHHDAS reproduces Farmer & Henley's 'penis'
and 'erectio penis' sense(s) of JACK (RHHDAS's JACK 8), the
'farthing' sense that (I claim) is most relevant to the minimizer use
of "jack(shit)" is not mentioned in RHHDAS, so this minimizer
(RHHDAS's JACK 15:  'the least bit, anything') appears to have
emerged from whole cloth with the first cite in 1973.  Here, the
epistemic and action domains (to not know/not do jack) are indeed the
attested ones, as Doug Wilson suggests, but the Farmer & Henley
documentation, together with what we know about the development of
minimizers, strongly suggests a continuum with the 'farthing' sense
(> to not be worth jack).  Is there a comprehensive and reputable
British slang dictionary that follows up on Farmer & Henley?

Equally suggestive, although somewhat frustrating, is the fact that
the OED (1st ed.) does list a sense for JACK (sense 17) it labels as
obsolete and colloquial with the gloss 'a very small amount, the
least bit, a whit', with a solitary cite from 1530, predating the
'farthing' sense (which appears two senses below) by almost 200
years.  This is a clear minimizer--indeed, the gloss is virtually
identical to the RHHDAS one for its 1973 attestation--but whether
it's related to the 'farthing' sense or the current usage is probably
impossible to document; I'm also not clear on whether this JACK is
taken to be a hapax legomenon.  There is, FWIW, a tendency to apply
various sorts of JACK (cf. OED's sense 33 for JACK-1 and its JACK-3)
to, as the OED puts it, 'things of smaller than the normal size'.
(While connecting obliquely to the minimizer sense, this also seems
to provide an elegant account of why "Jack" on the 'erectio penis'
sense might have been avoided in favor of the less misinterpretable
"Peter", "Dick", or "John Thomas"'.)

Hmmm.  Clearly a case of "more research is needed".

larry