Heard on The Judges: _front NP off_

[Wilson Gray]

On Thu, Apr 7, 2011 at 8:49 AM, Jonathan Lighter <wuxxmupp2000 at gmail.com> wrote:
> Got any theories about "jone"?
>
> It's in HDAS (as "joan") back to 1939 but w/o ety.
>

IIRC, the only place that I've seen the word in print is in Kochman's
1972 Rappin' and Stylin' Out, wherein _jone_ is the spelling. OTOH, it
may have been that I came across it in Hannerz 1969, because I clearly
recall being surprised that the word was also used in DC, so far from
Saint Louis, the only place that I've ever heard "jone"/"joan" used.
Hence, I didn't find the word in HDAS.

"Sounding" - 'Ey, man! How you gon' ac'? You gon' soun' me down?! -
and "playing the dozens" - I don't play 'em, but I know 'em when I
hear 'em! - were also known in The Lou of the '40's and '50's.

A further complication is that _Joan_ Blache [blaS] is a special
person from my lost adolescence. Hence, it didn't occur to me that
this so-sacred-fraught-with-meaning-for-me tetragrammaton could ever
be taken so in vain as to be used to refer to a mere social ritual.

In StL, you joned *with* a person and sounded *on* a person. The
preposition is missing from the quoted rhyme so as not to - WAG - fuck
up the assonance, in addition to kinda-sorta-maybe un-kiltering the
meaning.

As for the etymology, I can't hazard a guess. At the time, I at first
"heard" the word as _jawin'_, which later became _lonin'_ by a fairly
straightforward phonological process. But, given your evidence that
the term may well predate my birth by a couple of dekkids, it can only
be the case that I was doing an uncoscionscious self-etymologization,
so to speak, of a word that I was hearing for the first time. If my
pswaydo-analysis had had any validity, then there would have been a
period when both _jawin'_ and _jonin'_ were used in competition,
before the Vox Populi decreed that the former was lame. That was not
the case. Indeed, at the time, when I hadn't so much as heard the
words _phonology_ and _sociolinguistics_, the fact that I first heard
_jawin'_, then *suddenly* heard _jonin'_ and *just* as suddenly no
longer heard _jawin'_ was recognizable by me as a problem for my
analysis.

BTW, in StL, _nub_ was either  "fist," "fistfight ("Fight fair fist!"
was shouted at the combatants, presumably with the sense of "fight
fairly, using only your fists!") and "fight" as a verb.

FWIW, HDAS has _newk_ from 1985 (1965). But correspondence with others
on the 78thASA "alumni" listserv has persuaded me that my memory of
_newk_ as already traditional - whenever the members of a new class
arrived, the "old-timers" ritually chanted "Newk! Newk! Newk!" at them
as they stumbled into the barracks; the military is a strange scene,
even when no combat is involved - at the Army Language School, if not
elsewhere, before 1960 is correct. IME, the term was peculiar to the
ALS. But, apparently, with the passage of time, the word also came to
be used in both West Germany and West Berlin. Posters are asked to
provide the dates of their military servitude, so it's possible to
tell who was saying what when.

As to whether the term might have originated at the ALS, deponent sayeth not.

--
-Wilson
-----
All say, "How hard it is that we have to die!"---a strange complaint
to come from the mouths of people who have had to live.
-Mark Twain

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