Antedating of "Jazz" as Verb

Fri Sep 26 21:08:15 UTC 2008

The earliest occurrence in HDAS of "jazz" = "fuck" comes from 1918, an entry in a diary kept by John dos Passos, and of course not published until years afterwards.

I have been supposing that this sense arose because 1) one of the two original sense of "jazz" was "vigor", "energy", "enthusiasm" &c, and that words meaning vigor, energy, &c. are likely to come to mean sexual vigor, enery, &c.; and 2) the dancing that young people did to jazz music involved full-body contact and was supposed by the upright to be a precursor to fornication.  (When some tea-rooms began offering late afternoon dance music, there was an outburst of deploration; but one family-values faker opined that he didn't mind daylight dancing. so long as there was daylight between the dancers.)  This 1915 passage surely indicates that the word by then also meant "messed up", "bungled", made a hash of", or something.  Not, however, "fucked up", because if the editor of that newspaper thought that that would be an association made by his readers, he would not have allowed the word to be printed -- unless he was tired of newspaper work and ready for a career change.

In all of the 1912/1913 passages containing "jazz", the word can easily be replaced with "energy" or "nonsense".

Boies Spring was the source of "jazz" water -- it was a health resort built around a spring of naturally effervescent water, and the 1913 occurrences of "jazz" nearly all come from accounts of the SF Seals baseball teams, during its spring training there or from their regular season games.  Art Hickman seems to have been the first musician to apply the word "jazz" to music, and he was entertainment director at Boies Spring during the spring of 1913.
I don't have access to the digitized Chronicle.  It would be interesting to search it for references to Boies Spring, say 1911 to 1915.   A couple of years after 1913, Hickman was hired to lead a dance band at a very fashionable hotel in SF.  I have been able to look over a society magazine from SF in the mid 1910s, and have seen ads for the ball room at this hotel and then for Hickman's band there, but haven't yet seen anything using the word "jazz".  It would be interesting to search for Hicxkman.
Given the fact that the Proquest OCR has such a high failure rate in turning up what is in fact there, it's possible that searching for Boies Spring or Hickman would turn up some stories in fact containing the word jazz.

As it happens, the only actual contemporary connection now known between Hickman and the word "jazz" is from an interview from the late 1910s in which he repudiated the word.  By then jazz music had become a vaudeville and cabaret fad, and jazz musicians posed as purely instinctive musicians, everyone in the band playing what sounded good to him, the result being a sort of pleasingly energetic cacophony.  This wasn't what Hickman was about.  He and his musicians were highly skilled and played very elaborate arrangements.  His trademark had become compromised.

GAT

George A. Thompson
Author of A Documentary History of "The African Theatre", Northwestern Univ. Pr., 1998, but nothing much lately.

----- Original Message -----
From: Wilson Gray <hwgray at GMAIL.COM>
Date: Friday, September 26, 2008 11:22 am
Subject: Re: Antedating of "Jazz" as Verb
To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU

> Ca.1958, I worked with a white man, "Dave Beach, the old Irishman," as
> he styled himself, ca.65 years old, who *always* used "jazz" as a
> euphemism for "fuck." Therefore, could the headline mean, possibly,
> that
>
> C. S. Smith Almost _Fucks Up_ Game Cinched by Venice
>
> Dave was clearly old enough to have learned this meaning of "jazz"
> when it was still other than literary. It fell trippingly from his
> tongue and he never alternated it with "fuck."
>
> -Wilson
>
> On Thu, Sep 25, 2008 at 8:33 AM, Shapiro, Fred <fred.shapiro at yale.edu>
> wrote:
> > ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
> > Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> > Poster:       "Shapiro, Fred" <fred.shapiro at YALE.EDU>
> > Subject:      Antedating of "Jazz" as Verb
> > -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> >
> > The recent digitization of the San Francisco Chronicle by ProQuest
> does not seem to provide an antedating of the word "jazz."  However,
> it does antedate my previous discovery of the earliest occurrence of
> "jazz" as a verb, in a context that is cryptic but that connects with
> other early West Coast baseball usages of "jazz" that have been
> discovered and are newly incorporated into the OED:
> >
> >
> > jazz, v. (OED 1915)
> >
> > 1914 _S.F. Chronicle_ 7 May 10 (ProQuest Historical Newspapers)
> (headline)  Venice Tigers Step Further Out in Front as Seals Lose  C.
> S. Smith Almost Jazzes Game Cinched by Venice.
> >
> >
> > The body of the article describes reliever C. S. Smith almost
> blowing a baseball game against the Oakland Oaks.  I don't see the
> word "jazz" used in the body of the article, but the body is poorly
> OCR'd (the headline is very clear) and I will study it more carefully
> when I have the time.  I guess the usage of "jazz" here seems on its
> face to mean "blows, messes up."
> >
> > Fred Shapiro
> >
> >
> >
> > -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> > Fred R. Shapiro                                            Editor
> > Associate Librarian for Collections and        YALE BOOK OF QUOTATIONS
> >  Access and Lecturer in Legal Research     Yale University Press
> > Yale Law School                                           ISBN 0300107986
> > e-mail: fred.shapiro at yale.edu
> > ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> >
> > ------------------------------------------------------------
> > The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
> >
>
>
>
> --
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