Jazz, was:RE: [ADS-L] Q: "Earliest written reference to baseball"

[Stephen Goranson]

George and list,

Do you (or others here) have a proposed etymology (other than the OED's first listing) for Jazz, Jass?
I am not sure, myself.

I know the following is from way, way out in left field, but, if you haven't seen a picture of Jass the Jester, here's one
(scroll down one page):

http://books.google.com/books?id=mkYKAAAAIAAJ&pg=PA438&dq=jester+jass+thun&hl=en&ei=CaOATcCqH8m3twelhLDWCA&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=2&ved=0CC4Q6AEwAQ#v=onepage&q=jester%20jass%20thun&f=false
or
http://tinyurl.com/66lrqj3

Stephen Goranson
http://www.duke.edu/~goranson

________________________________________
From: American Dialect Society [ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU] On Behalf Of George Thompson [george.thompson at NYU.EDU]
Sent: Tuesday, March 15, 2011 11:10 PM
To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
Subject: Re: [ADS-L] Q: "Earliest written reference to baseball"

I was internationally famous for about 72 hours in July, 2001, when the NYTimes reported that I had found a newspaper story alluding to a base ball game in NYC in 1823 on a rich guy's country estate, on the west side of Broadway, between Washington Place and 8th street.  A few years later, John Thorn found a village ordinance from the late 1790s forbidding boys from playing base ball too near the village hall, in Pittsfield -- it seems that they were breaking windows with home runs.
My game remains the earliest mention of baseball as a game played by adults -- manly and athletic young men, to be exact.

Jane Austen's reference to baseball in a manuscript written in the 1790s, though not published until the 1810s, if I recall, was in the original OED, and appeared in a fascicle that was published well before the Abner Doubleday hoax was perpetrated. Since then, a few other mentions of base ball in 18th C England have turned up.

The question of whether these were the same game as the baseball played in the mid and late 19th C has come to be a matter of considerable research these last 10 years.
There is a description of the Englsh game of baseball in an encyclopedia of the sports and games of the world compiled by a learned German in the 1790s.  Other than this, I'm not hopeful of finding detailed descriptions of the games to offer definitive proof.
However . . . . .
First, I am an evolutionist, and suppose that just as the modern passenger jet evolved from the Wright Bros. biplane, however little they resemble one another, and the modern horse evolved from eohippus, and modern folks evolved from knuckle-draggers, so modern baseball evolved from earlier sports.
Second, I am fond of the "Sherlock's dog" style of reasoning, as I demonstrated here recently by arguing that the earliest meaning of "jazz" couldn't be obscene, because if it were, newspapers wouldn't have printed it without blushes as the name of a musical fad.  You will recall the Holmes story about a horrible murder in the dark of night.  Holmes refers trenchantly to the curious behavior of the dog that night.  Watson, the dunderhead, says, but Holmes, the dog did nothing that night.  Ah, says Holmes, that is what is so curious.  Just as I noted trenchantly the curious behavior of the newspaper editors confronted with the word "jazz", so I note the fact that the mid-19th C newspapers, when reporting on the new sporting fad, baseball, didn't say, "don't mistake this game for the game that Grandad used to play".  They did not recognize it as an essentially different game from the one played in 1823.

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: "Joel S. Berson" <Berson at ATT.NET>
Date: Tuesday, March 15, 2011 7:35 pm
Subject: Q: "Earliest written reference to baseball"
To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU

>  From the New York Times, Sunday March 13, "Debate Over Baseball's
> Origins Spills into Another Century" (p 9, New England Edition).  Also
> at
> http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/13/sports/baseball/13thorn.html?scp=1&sq=dbate%20baseball%27s%20origins&st=cse
>
> Caption on photograph says:  "The baseball historian John Thorn,
> [right] center, in 2004 presenting a 215-year-old document that is
> the earliest written reference to baseball."
>
> I plead too much on baseball in the ADS archives to search.  Do we
> all know what this document from 1789 is, and does it use the word
> "baseball"?  The OED of 1989 has the Austen a1817 quotation as its
> earliest. A quick look into the archives says there is an instance,
> with picture, from 1744.
>
> Joel
>
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