"Orgiasm": another candidate ancestor of "jasm"/"jism"

[Douglas G. Wilson]

A while ago I hypothesized that "jasm" and "jism" might both have
originated from an abbreviation of "enthusiasm", which has overlapping
sense. However the phonetics is a stretch: what one would want would be
"jiasm", while "enthusiasm" would probably give "ziasm".

I know of only one word which clearly gives "jiasm" (which arguably would
tend to be simplified to both "jism" and "jasm"): that is "orgiasm". Of
course this is the noun corresponding to the adjective "orgiastic" (as
"orgasm" corresponds to "orgastic"). "Orgiasm" apparently can/could mean
"orgiastic quality" (OR "practice of holding orgies").

I suppose the conventional objection to this possibility would be that this
word was probably vanishingly rare or virtually nonexistent, perhaps merely
a sporadic error for "orgasm", probably nobody ever spoke it, etc. Most
(even big) dictionaries don't show it at all. My OED says (in reference to
its single citation) "... a state of excited or exalted feeling ...", and
calls the word "rare".

Now we have Google Books (even with its many severe flaws), and maybe this
odd word doesn't look so very rare after all.

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Henry Hart Milman, _The History of Christianity_ (John Murray, 1840), v. 2,
p. 213:

<<The Orgiasm, the inward rapture, the working of a divine influence upon
the soul, till it was wrought up to a state of holy frenzy, had continually
sent forth the priests of Cybele, and females of a highly excitable
temperament, ....>>

[this example appears (all by its lonesome) in my OED]

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J. B. Lightfoot, _St. Paul's Epistles to the Colossians and to Philemon_
(Macmillan, 1875), p. 98:

<<.... that ... the Phrygians ... should have exchanged the fanatical
orgiasm of their heathen worship for the rigid puritanism of the Novatianist.>>

----------

Otto Pfleiderer (translated by Allan Menzies), _The Philosophy of Religion
on the Basis of Its History_ (Williams and Norgate, 1886), v. 4, p. 51:

<<Thus this abstract idealism ended at the very point at which the
primitive belief in revelation had begun in natural religion; in mindless
enthusiasm and orgiasm!>>

----------

F. W. Nietzsche (translated by Thomas Common), "My Indebtedness to the
Ancients", in _The Works of Friedrich Nietzsche, Vol. XI_ (Macmillan,
1896), p. 226:

<<... that element -- orgiasm -- out of which Dionysian art evolves.>>

----------

Houston Stewart Chamberlain, John Lees, _Foundations of the Nineteenth
Century_ (Ballantyne, 1911), v. 2, p. 16:

<<Egyptian asceticism and the doctrine of immortality, Syrian and
Phoenician orgiasm and the delusion of the sacrament, ....>>

----------

William Lyon Phelps, _Essays on Russian Novelists_ (Macmillan, 1911), p. 250:

<<'The death of "Every-day-ism,"' the 'resurrection of myth,' 'orgiasm,'
'Mystical Anarchism,' and 'universalist individualism' are some of the
shibboleths of these new writers, ....>>

----------

And there are more.

Including one (1911) apparently referring to the "systematised orgiasm of
the Salvation Army".

It is virtually certain (IMHO) that this word was routinely confused and
conflated with "orgasm". Here is one example where the above "orgiasm"
seems appropriate, but "orgasm" appears:

----------

_New York Times_, 20 March 1858, p. 4:

<<It is the stupor of Mammon-worship, not the orgasm of the Anabaptists,
which threatens the nation as a nation.>>

----------

Possibly in a number of cases like this "orgiasm" has been edited to the
more familiar "orgasm". In casual speech, it may be that something commonly
pronounced "orjiasm" once covered the semantic territories of "orgasm" and
"orgiasm", extending both to sex/ejaculation and to unrestrained
not-necessarily-sexual fervor/enthusiasm.

Then the apheretic form (theoretically "jiasm") might believably have been
produced both as "jism" and as "jasm", in both sexual and non-sexual
senses. And thence, of course, both "jizz" and "jazz".

Just a speculation.

-- Doug Wilson


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