English "jitter" from German "zittern"?

Douglas G. Wilson douglas at NB.NET
Sun Dec 24 03:25:54 UTC 2006


In the absence of evidence (paper trail), various guesses can be entertained.

If the word originated in German, I would naively speculate a US origin
(perhaps NY Yiddish) rather than European.

In the 1930's there were "jitter-juice", "jitter-sauce", etc. = "booze", I
think.

-- Doug Wilson


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