World Wide Words -- 03 Jul 04

[Michael Quinion]

WORLD WIDE WORDS            ISSUE 399          Saturday 3 July 2004
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Sent each Saturday to 19,000+ subscribers in at least 120 countries
Editor: Michael Quinion, Thornbury, Bristol, UK      ISSN 1470-1448
<http://www.worldwidewords.org>      <TheEditor at worldwidewords.org>
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Contents
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1. Feedback, notes and comments.
2. Weird Words: Sphairistike.
3. Sic!
4. Q&A: Jazz.
A. Subscription commands.
B. Useful URLs.


1. Feedback, notes and comments
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BOOK PUBLICATION  Heavens, have I been busy this week. My new book
(an extract of which forms the Q&A item below) was published on
Thursday, as a result of which I have spent most of the past two
days in a radio studio in Bristol, talking down the line to what
feels like every local radio station in the UK. My US publisher
chose this week to send me the proofs of the American edition for
correction, and another publisher is chasing me urgently to agree
the contract for my next book. It's nice to feel wanted, but I can
now tell you from experience that this fifteen-minutes-of-fame
business is overrated.

Not only am I trying to get on with my regular freelance research
for the OED and write World Wide Words, but also the impending
renewal date of my current contract with a web-hosting provider
meant I have had to take time to search around to see if a better
deal is available. As a result, in the next few days, I shall be
moving the World Wide Words site to a new provider, which may
result in some brief interruption of service (though it should
not). Apologies if any e-mail goes astray during the changeover.
The new system has several extra features that I hope to put to
good use in the coming months.

The point behind this bloggish chat is that much of the e-mail that
accumulated during my recent holiday remains unanswered. Apologies
to everyone affected.

DRY RUN  Douglas Wilson of the American Dialect Society has found
evidence that suggests a more plausible origin for this expression
than those I mentioned in my Q&A piece for 19 June.

The term "run", more fully "fire run", has for at least the past
century been used by local fire departments in the USA for a call-
out to the site of a fire. It was once common for fire departments
or volunteer hose companies to give exhibitions of their prowess at
carnivals or similar events. A report of one such appeared in the
Stevens Point Journal for 8 July 1899: "Wednesday night's carnival
feature was a grand exhibition fire run by the Milwaukee fire
department, under the direction of Fire Chief James Foley."
Companies also competed with each other to show how well they could
do. These competitions had fairly standard rules, of which several
examples appear in the press of this period, such as in the Olean
Democrat of 2 August 1888: "Not less than fifteen or more than
seventeen men to each company. Dry run, standing start, each team
to be allowed one trial; cart to carry 350 feet of hose in 50 foot
lengths ...".

The reports show that a "dry run" in the jargon of the fire service
at this period was one that didn't involve the use of water, as
opposed to a "wet run" that did. In some competitions there was a
specific class for the latter, one of which was reported in the
Salem Daily News for 6 July 1896: "The wet run was made by the
Fulton hook and ladder company and the Deluge hose company. The run
was made east in Main street to Fawcett's store where the ladders
were raised to the top of the building. The hose company attached
[its] hose to a fire plug and ascending the ladder gave a fine
exhibition."

It's clear that the idea of a dry run being a rehearsal would very
readily follow from the jargon usage, though it first appears in
print only in 1940, in an Army context. Douglas Wilson found that
by March 1943 the idea of a dry run as a rehearsal had so taken
hold that Stars and Stripes created an odd-looking compound term in
a feature on an airbase crash team: "There aren't any brass poles,
and no false alarms, but there is plenty of authentic firehouse
atmosphere around the place. Regularly the crash crews go tearing
out on a dry run; once in a while they empty the 400-gallon tank on
their truck in a wet dry run."

He also points out that there is another sense in which dry run is
used today in the US - that of a call-out of an emergency vehicle,
such as an ambulance, in which no service is given, either because
the patient refused help or because no emergency was found. He
suggests that this might have arisen through an extension of the
firefighting term in situations in which the crew arrived at the
scene of a supposed fire but found either that it was already out
or that it was a false alarm. In neither case would any water be
pumped, so they were also dry runs in the firefighters' jargon.


2. Weird Words: Sphairistike  /sfE@'rIstIkI/
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A ball game that developed into lawn tennis.

This is the name of an ancient Greek ball game that Major Walter
Wingfield borrowed for the recreation he patented in 1874, in part
a conflation of elements borrowed from earlier games: the net from
badminton, the ball from fives, and the scoring from racquets. If
that name had caught on, we would now be watching the Wimbledon
Sphairistike Championships. Luckily for sports commentators it
didn't, for the very good reason that only those few people well
versed in ancient Greek knew how to say it. Most converted it into
a three-syllable word that roughly rhymed with "pike". This was
soon abbreviated either to "sticky" or the mock-French "stické".
However, in his patent, Major Wingfield also called it "lawn
tennis", a name he chose to distinguish it from the much older
indoor game often called court tennis. A modified version of his
game immediately became hugely popular under his alternate name,
though it was soon abbreviated just to "tennis", so that the
aficionados of the older game in snobbish retaliation started to
call theirs "real tennis", a term later mistakenly converted to
"royal tennis" in Britain and some other countries.


3. Sic!
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Phil Wolff found this intriguing item in the June 27 issue of the
Peninsula Daily News, Washington state: "An era of gentile motoring
returned to Port Angeles on Saturday as the Graham Owners Club
brought nearly 20 of the classic motor cars to Port Angeles City
Pier." What would Jewish or Mormon motoring be like?

The Sydney Morning Herald reported on 18 June that a story on that
week's issue of the North Shore Times included the following
sentence: "Bowels might not be the topic of polite conversation
ordinarily, but doctors are hoping this week they'll be on the tip
of everyone's tongue."

In last week's issue of New Scientist, the Engineering and Physical
Science Research Council advertised a seminar on ways to avoid
having to dig so many holes in our roads to maintain pipes and
cables. It commented: "The event is an ideal opportunity to
understand what is really involved in finding a solution to the
buried infrastructure in the UK and to make your contribution to
the direction of future ground-breaking research." I see: ground-
breaking research on how to avoid breaking so much ground.

A photo caption spotted by Julane Marx in the June/July 2004 issue
of Habitat World: "Robert Spence, 3, has lived in a Habitat house
in Bakersfield, Calif., since 1998." What she'd like to know is
whether Robert has been three for the entire six years he's lived
there, and how he's managed it.


4. Q&A
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Q. Could you please tell me the origin of the word "jazz". [Brett
Culton]

A. It's a deceptively simple question. A mish-mash of colliding
egos, conflicting claims and confused memories has led researchers
down many false trails while searching for the origins of this
American art form, not least where its name came from.

To pluck some examples from the many in the books: people have
pointed to "Jasper", the name of a dancing slave on a plantation
near New Orleans in about 1825 whose nickname was "Jazz"; to a
Mississippi drummer named "Chas" Washington in the late nineteenth
century or to "Chas", the nickname of Charles Alexander (of
Alexander's Ragtime Band) about 1910; to a Chicago musician named
"Jasbo" Brown; to a band conductor in New Orleans about 1904 called
"Mr Razz"; to the French "chassé", a gliding dancing step that had
already been turned into the archetypically American verb "sashay"
as long ago as the 1830s; to the French "jaser", useless talk for
the pleasure of hearing one's own voice; or the Arabic "jazib", one
who allures.

The intimate association of jazz with American black culture has
led others to look for an origin in African languages, such as the
Mandingo "jasi", become unlike oneself, Tshiluba "jaja", cause to
dance, or Temne "yas", be extremely lively or energetic.

One early jazz player, Garvin Bushell, was sure it had a fragrant
origin. In his 1988 book Jazz From the Beginning, he remembers his
early days in music, around 1916: "The perfume industry was very
big in New Orleans in those days, since the French had brought it
over with them. They used jasmine - oil of jasmine - in all
different odors to pep it up. It gave more force to the scent. So
they would say, 'let's jass it up a bit,' when something was a
little dead." John Philip Sousa suggested in the 1920s that jazz
slid into our vocabulary by way of the vaudeville stage, in which
all the acts would come back on to the stage at the end of a
performance to give a rousing, boisterous finale called a "jazzbo",
a type of low physical comedy. (This one looks plausible; however,
"jazzbo" isn't recorded before 1917 and might be from "jazz" plus
"bo", an abbreviation of "boy".)

If you weren't confused before, I suspect you are now. There are
more folk etymologies around this word than almost any other, many
of them vehemently held in defiance of the evidence.

What we do know, as the result of research by Gerald Cohen, is that
the word suddenly starts to appear in the "San Francisco Bulletin"
in March 1913 in a series of articles about baseball by E T "Scoop"
Gleeson (it's recently been found that an isolated example appeared
about a year earlier in the "Los Angeles Times", but this is also
in a baseball context). Early examples had nothing to do with music
but referred to an intangible quality possessed by baseball
players, what another writer in the newspaper, Ernest Hopkins,
described in April that year as "life, vigor, energy, effervescence
of spirit, joy, pep, magnetism, verve, virility, ebulliency,
courage, happiness - oh, what's the use? - JAZZ. Nothing else can
express it".

Gleeson later said that he had got it from another newsman, Spike
Slattery, while they were at the training camp of the local
baseball team, the San Francisco Seals. Slattery said he had heard
it in a crap game. Art Hickman, an unemployed local musician, was
at the camp to make contacts among the newsmen but took on the job
of organising evening entertainments. Among these was a ragtime
band he created from other out-of-work musicians, including a
couple of banjo players. It was this band that developed a new
sound that started to be described in the training camp as jazz.
This name went with Hickman to engagements in San Francisco and
later to New York, though his type of syncopated rag, later to be
called sweet jazz, turned out to be a dead end musically.

By the following year, it seems that the word had spread to
Chicago, most probably through the efforts of another bandleader,
Bert Kelly. In 1916 it appeared there in a different spelling in
the name of the New Orleans Jass Band. Despite this band's name,
the word wasn't known in New Orleans until 1917, as early jazz
musicians attested. It is said to have arrived through the medium
of a letter from Freddie Keppard in Chicago to the cornet player
Joe Oliver. Oliver showed the letter to his protégé Louis Armstrong
and the name soon became applied to the New Orleans style that
became dominant and which was later called hot jazz to distinguish
it from the Art Hickman sort.

The big question remains: where did those San Francisco
crapshooters of 1913 get their word from? This is the point where
we step off the path and run the risk of disappearing into an
etymological quicksand. Scoop Gleason said that when they rolled
the dice players would call out "Come on, the old jazz". It looks
as though they were using the word as an incantation, a call to
Lady Luck to smile on them.

It's commonly said that the word had strong sexual associations,
being a low slang term among blacks for copulation. This may be so,
though it's odd that the worldly-wise journalists on the San
Francisco Bulletin didn't realise it at the time. If they had, they
would surely have stopped using it, at least in their newspaper
columns. The first direct sexual associations date only from 1918,
at a point by which the word's musical sense had become firmly
established. We have no knowledge of the racial background of those
crap shooters in San Francisco, so there's even doubt whether the
word has any associations with black English at all.

The most plausible sexual origin is in the word "jism", also known
as "jasm". This has a long history in American English, being known
in print from 1842 and probably a lot earlier still in the spoken
language. It could have the same sense of spirit, energy or
strength later associated with jazz, but the primary idea seems to
have been semen or sperm, a meaning "jism" still has, one that has
obvious associations with vitality and virility. It may be relevant
that one of the earlier examples, in the "Daily Californian" in
February 1916, writes the word as "jaz-m".

It doesn't seem too implausible to suggest that "jasm" lost its
final letter, turned into "jass" and then into "jazz". It's likely
that Gleeson and his fellow newspapermen didn't connect their new
word "jazz" with "jism", not knowing about the intermediate steps.

Of course, that just takes the whole matter back another step in
this never-ending dance of word history. The English Dialect
Dictionary records the eighteenth-century form "chissom", to bud,
sprout or germinate, which looks possible. Others have pointed to
an origin, via black slaves, from words like Ki-Kongo "dinza", the
life force, or from other African languages. So at least some of
those folk etymologies may be nearer the truth than one might have
thought.

[This answer appears in a slightly modified form in my new book,
Port Out, Starboard Home: And Other Language Myths, published in
the UK and Commonwealth countries last Thursday, 1 July, by Penguin
Books. ISBN 0-14-051534-8, hardcover, pp304; UK publisher's price
GBP12.99. It is to be published in the USA in October 2004 under
the title Ballyhoo, Buckaroo, and Spuds by the Smithsonian
Institution Press; hardcover, pp224; ISBN 1-58834-219-0;
publisher's price US$19.95.]

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