Origin of "jazz"--Hickman is unreliable

[Gerald Cohen]

    Here is a response to two points made by John Baker in his Oct. 29
message about "jazz":

Point #1:

>Nobody, other than Gleeson, mentions Gleeson's role.  Even Ernest
>Hopkins, who wrote "In Praise of 'Jazz,' a Futurist Word Which Has
>Just Joined the Language" for the Bulletin on April 5, 1913, did not
>credit Gleeson...

    But Hopkins did credit the _S.F.Bulletin_, the newspaper for which
Gleeson wrote; and Gleeson was the primer user of the term "jazz."
Hopkins wrote  that "It [the term "jazz"] has recently become current
in The Bulletin office."

    Speaking of the term "jazz"/"jaz", Hopkins wrote:

        'THIS COLUMN is entitled "What's not in the news," but
occasionally a few things that are in the news leak in.  We have been
trying for some time to keep one of those things out, but hereby
acknowledge ourselves powerless and surrender.
                                          * * *
        'THIS THING is a word.  It has recently become current in The
Bulletin office, through some means which we cannot discover but
would stop up if we could. ...'

Point #2:

>  It seems far more likely that Gleeson's sources (whoever they were)
>corrected his March 3 use.  Gleeson's writing may have had an
>important role in popularizing "jazz," but it seems unlikely that
>almost everyone in the San Francisco area learned the word from him.

       But who could those totally mysterious sources be? If they were
the ballplayers to whom Hickman alludes in his 1919 interview, why is
there not a single attestation of "jazz" attested in the speech of
ballplayers in the Feb. - June 1913 _S.F. Bulletin_ articles?  Every
single attestation of "jazz" in this time period comes solely from
the sportswriters. Sportswriters love to quote sports figures--it
makes for good copy, especially if anything out of the ordinary is
said. If a ballplayer in spring training started using a new word,
the sportswriters should have been quoting him right away.

    And why is it implausible that a new term should spread via the
media? In NYC of 1921ff. the term "the big apple" (= NYC racetracks)
spread at first via the single-handed efforts of turf writer John J.
Fitz Gerald. Why shouldn't Gleeson have been able to exert a similar
influence in San Francisco some eight years earlier?

---Gerald Cohen