"spoofy" and "shimming" in Utah, 1919

George Thompson george.thompson at NYU.EDU
Mon Mar 7 02:29:37 UTC 2011


Wilson:
> the question: how and when did _jass_ / _jazz_ come to take on, for a brief period, the relevant [obscene] meaning?
>
I say for 2 reasons:

first, one of the original meanings was "vigor, energy", &c: a baseball team that played well showed jazz, and a baseball team that showed jazz played well-- this is the theme of most of the 1913 citations.  But any word that means "vigor, energy" is likely to drift into meaning "sexual vigor, energy".
second, jazz music was the accompaniment to the sort of social dancing by young people that the family-values creeps of the day denounced as horribly resembling and inevitably leading to, fornication.  (A fad arose in the early 1910s in NYC among the seemingly respectable of having social dances at tea-time  --"tea-dances" -- one of the moral pundits of the day said that he didn't object to daylight dancing, but he wanted to see daylight between the dancers.)

The earliest appearances of "jazz" = "fuck" are all unpublished, and all to be found in HDAS, which dates the first 2 to 1918 & the 3rd to 1919
        Dolph Sound Off! 114: Oh, I’m going to a better land, they jazz there every night. (HDAS, jazz v. 2.)
        Noyes MS. (unp.): [Navy slang:] Hump=Jazz=Cunt. (HDAS, jazz n. l.a.)
        Inman Diary 167: He had had sexual relations with her (in his slang “had jazzed her”). (HDAS, jazz v. 1.)

By the end of the 1920s, "jazz" could be used in a published story, serving as strong language, but dodging even stronger language:
        [James T.] Farrell Guillotine Party 302: She’s cute. I jazzed her, too. (HDAS, jazz v. 1 & OED, jazz, verb, 3, citing the entry on "jazz" before the revision of a couple of years ago)

If someone comes up with a newspaper paragraph from 1916 or 1917 referring to "that vulgar music with the vulgar name" or to "****", then I will have to defend my position, which is that, contrary to widely held opinion, the music was not called "jazz" because it was supposed to be music to fuck by and that the word "jazz" was not meant to be derogatory or contemptuous or dismissive of the music.
As things stand, "jazz" could be printed in several San Francisco & Oakland newspapers in 1913 & 1914; in the Chicago Daily Tribune, in 1914; in the Chicago Herald, the Indianapolis Star, the Los Angeles Times, the Cedar Rapids Evening Gazette, the Sheboygan Press, the Chicago Defender (a black newspaper), the Freeman (ditto, from Indianapolis)  & Variety, all in 1916; New York Times, NY Herald, the New York Globe & Commercial Advertiser, the Detroit Free Press, the Milwaukee Journal, the Atlanta Constitution, Winona [Minnesota] Daily Republican, the Kansas City Sun, & the Washington Post, all from 1917; the New Orleans Times-Picayune & the Commercial Advertiser of Canton, N. Y., 1918.  (Including variant spellings); Salt Lake City by 1919
This leaves the northwestern and southwestern states not yet heard from; the central states are pretty well covered, north to south; perhaps Oklahoma, Mississippi and Alabama should be looked into; there's nothing from Massachusetts or Pennsylvania, but it doesn't seem likely that such a word would travel from either state to California and be there by 1912.

These newspaper references were found by various people, incl. JL, Ben Zimmer, Barry Popik, & Fred Shapiro; some came from published hisotries of jazz; only a few found by me.

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.

----- Original Message -----
From: Wilson Gray <hwgray at gmail.com>
Date: Sunday, March 6, 2011 7:57 pm
Subject: Re: "spoofy" and "shimming" in Utah, 1919
To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU

> On Sun, Mar 6, 2011 at 1:28 PM, George Thompson
> <george.thompson at nyu.edu> wrote:
> > [I]f 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.
>
> Your logic is impeccable. However, it raises - or should that be
> "begs"? (for those with no sense of humor, the question is meant to be
> interpreted as facetious and not as a genuine request for guidance) -
> the question: how and when did _jass_ / _jazz_ come to take on, for a
> brief period, the relevant meaning?
>
> OTOH, one might argue that, given that Mormons are not known to get
> down, even today, perhaps the editor was simply unhip.
>
> --
> -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
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org

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