"spoofy" and "shimming" in Utah, 1919

[George Thompson]

I was tipped recently to a database of Utah newspapers, and have just checked it for "jazz"/"jass" -- nothing but jazz music, earliest 1918.

However, in a story headed "Soph Dance Saturday to be "Spiffy" Affair" I note the following:

The committee on arrangements has promised a good time to all attending and has made the statement that a sufficient quantity of the "spoofiest" sort of punch has been ordered for the affair.  A large jass orchestra has been engaged to render all the latest hits and entrancing melodies.  The floor will be put in excellent shape for dancing, "shimming" or jazzing, as each one see fit to indulge in.
Utah Chronicle, [University of Utah, Salt Lake City], March 10, 1919, p. 1

http://udn.lib.utah.edu/cdm4/document.php?CISOROOT=/chrony3&CISOPTR=107442&CISOSHOW=107458&REC=1

Strangely, the OED is trying to tell me that there is no such word as "spoof" -- a bit of prescriptivism that I do not expect from the OED.  The word is in a recent Shorter OED, though, but not with an appropriate meaning, and not "spoofy".
"Shimming" isn't in the OED, nor "shim"; "shimmy" as a dance is from [1917] and 1918.
OED is also claiming that there is no such word as "spiffy", though it's in the SOED, 5th ed., 2002.

I do take this result as one more bit of evidence that "jazz" was not known somewhere to mean "fucking" before it came to be applied to music.
My notion is, that if a newspaper editor knew that in his region "jazz" was known as an obscenity, when "jazz" became a national musical fad, he would have shown some embarrassment in printing the word, or would have refused to print it at all.  Here we have the student paper in Salt Lake City printing "jass orchestra" and "jazzing", with no qualms, to add to a number of other papers, north & south, east & west, that printed the word before 1920.

GAT

George A. Thompson
Author of A Documentary History of "The African Theatre", Northwestern Univ. Pr., 1998, but nothing much lately.  Working on a new edition, though.

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