A meaning missing from DARE

[Wilson Gray]

For some reason, DARE includes some of the BE slang formations based on
the word "jaw," but not the standard Regional (B)E meaning. The
Southern Regional (Black only?) English meaning of "jaw" is "cheek."
When I was a child in East Texas, one of my favorite candies was the
so-called "jawbreaker." DARE defines this as "a large, round, hard
candy." The jawbreaker that I know is/was a large sphere of chewing gum
encased in a hard candy shell. To get at the gum, you held the
jawbreaker in your mouth between "jaw" and gum till the shell was
dissolved, at which point you had the gum to chew. Because the word
"jaw" meant "cheek," I couldn't understand how this confection got its
name. Clearly, you can't break a "jaw." And no older child or any adult
could explain it to me, either. However, if the confection had been
called the "jaw_bone_breaker," then its name would have made perfect
sense.

And indeed, "jawbone breaker" is cited in DARE as a BE alternative to
"jawbreaker." Clearly, after my family had moved out from behind the
Cotton Curtain, someone found a sensible way to make sense out of the
nonsensical.

That this use of "jaw" for "cheek" was not just a local phenomenon is
shown by the occurrence of this use in various blues and rhythm-&-blues
songs composed by non-Texans. Cf., e.g. the following couplet from the
song, "I Don't Know," composed by Willie Mabon, a native of Hollywood,
TN ["T" for 'Texas" and "T" for "Tennessee," again]:

The woman I love she got dimples in her jaws.
The clothes she wears is made out of the best of cloths.

Because of the pervasive Jim Crow of the time, I never had occasion to
talk to any European-Americans from the South till years later, when I
was in the Army, long after I had learned the "correct" uses of "cheek"
and "jaw" and it never occurred to me to ask them whether they shared
the cheek-for-jaw usage or had ever shared it. I say "ever," because
there was, at that time, a lot of pressure put on all Southerners,
regardless of race, to make their speech conform to the relevant
Northern standard.

A couple of slang usages not in DARE are "tighten [someone's] jaws" =
"make [someone] angry"; "get the jaws" = "get angry."

-Wilson Gray