etymological question: "jack shit"

[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?

I don't know about "comprehensive and reputable," but Partridge DSUE8
does not have anything relevant here. Interestingly, Partridge mentions
the 'the least bit' sense that Larry mentions below, and gives it the
dates "ca. 1500-1650"; judging from Partridge's usual practices, he
simply made up the date based on the OED's quote, but in any case he
does not bring the sense any more recent. There is no other equivalent
in DSUE that could have bearing.

As for the HDAS's treatment, we left out the 'farthing' sense because
as far as we could tell it was exclusively British and didn't seem
to have any bearing on the development of the American usage. (Contrast
this with _jack_ 'penis', which is attested in an American source.) It
seemed so unlikely that this extremely early British sense could have
been the etymon for an Americanism first recorded in the early 1970s
that we didn't think it was worth bringing up.

If there were a continuum from the 'farthing' sense to some other minimized
sense, I'd be happy to accept this and revise the HDAS treatment, or
reflect it in the OED's treatment, rather. But, barring the discovery
of intermediate citations in any possibly relevant sense, I'd still
argue that we have two semantically close but otherwise unrelated
senses of _jack_ here, and I don't know the etymology for the
second one.

Jesse Sheidlower
OED

>
> 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.