The name "Jazzer"--(was: jazzer, 1896)

[Gerald Cohen]

I'm sending this to the American Name Society as well as to ads-l. ---

    George Thompson's spotting of the 19th century name "Jazzer"
raises the question" Where did this name come from?

    I'd guess: from French "jaser" (= chatter). So "Jazzer" (as a
name) would originally have been "Chatterer/Chatterbox."

    Is there any scholarly literature to confirm or refute this suggestion?

Gerald Cohen
P.S. to ANS: Thanks for the helpful replies on "Testaverde."



>Date:         Thu, 9 Oct 2003 16:24:09 -0400
>Reply-To: American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
>From: George Thompson <george.thompson at NYU.EDU>
>Subject:      jazzer, 1896
>To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
>
>You folks may recall that I posted a few weeks ago a joke from an
>1896 Massachusetts newspaper in the form of a dialog between
>"Goslin" and "Jazzer".  Since then, it has occurred to me that in as
>much as "Goslin" is an authentic name -- not common, but some may
>remember "Goose" Goslin, who played baseball from 1921 to 1938 --
>then perhaps "Jazzer" is also a name.
>
>Quickly consulting some indexes to the names in the late 19th
>C/early 20th C U. S. censuses, I find that the name Jazzer or Jasser
>appeared in Alabama in 1870 and in New York in 1900.  In 1910, in
>the NYC section of the census, there were 6 Jassers and 1 Jazzer.
>The name did not show up in Massachusetts census indexes.  These
>indexes are to the names of the heads of households listed in the
>notebooks the census-takers carried about.  Nearly all of the
>notebooks from the 1890 census were destroyed in a fire very many
>years ago, and the notebooks from the 1870, 1880, 1900 & 1910
>censues for some of the states have not yet been indexed.  It's
>obviously a very uncommon name, but a few people carried it in this
>country before 1896.
>RLIN shows no book by a Jazzer, but a dozen or so by Jasser, most in
>German, but it seems also possiible as an Arab name.
>
>So perhaps the contriver of this joke, not wanting to use the usual
>names for his interlocutors, such as He & She, or Pat & Mike, &c.,
>used a couple of names he had somewhere come upon and remembered as
>inherently comical.
>
>If so, then it saves us the problem of contriving a history of the
>word "Jazz" that would account for its giving rise in 1896 in
>Massachusetts to a nickname apparently meaning "One who jazzes".
>Which would be a blessing.
>
>GAT
>
>George A. Thompson
>Author of A Documentary History of "The African Theatre",
>Northwestern Univ. Pr., 1998.