Reflections on 1831 "jazz"

[Douglas G. Wilson]

>Sort of a which came first argument but, interesting that this
>Palmerston quote could, i n ways, echo today's usage of f*cking as in:
>'They were just f*cking around', 'I was just f*cking with him', 'f*cking
>off'

This assumes that "jaser" has/had the sense "f*ck". I cannot find any
reference which supports this, except for an entry in Farmer's "Vocabula
Amatoria" (1896), in which the supporting citation is opaque to me. I
suspect the equivalence of "jaser" = "f*ck" was either nonce or erroneous.
If anyone has any other reference which would support "jaser" in a sexual
sense, I would like to review it. "Jaser" =
"babble"/"squeal"/"blab"/"chat"/"badmouth"/etc., and also (slang) "pray".

Possibly an apt comparison would be with English "bullshit" (verb). The
postulated English verb "jazz" = "talk nonsense"/"bullshit" may have
persisted in expressions such as "You're jazzing me!"

-- Doug Wilson