etymological question: "jack shit"

[James Smith]

--- Jesse Sheidlower <jester at PANIX.COM> wrote:
> > 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.

My desk reference dictionary doesn't confirm this, but
in the past I've understood:

jack = Scots (Celtic?) for man
jock = Scots (Celtic) for penis
which produces the related set of words:
jock <> jack <> John <> Johnny <> jockey <> jock <>
...

jock strap = penis or man strap > jock = athlete
(Does the phrase "female jock" sound as bizzare to you
as it does to me?)

=====
James D. SMITH                 |If history teaches anything
SLC, UT                        |it is that we will be sued
jsmithjamessmith at yahoo.com     |whether we act quickly and decisively
                               |or slowly and cautiously.

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