[Ads-l] Lewis Porter on the origins of "jazz"

[Ben Zimmer]

See also our discussion in 2015 about "The Jazz Girls" appearing in the
credits of the earliest known stag film, questionably dated to 1915.

http://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/ads-l/2015-October/thread.html#139468


On Tue, Mar 19, 2019 at 12:59 PM Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at yale.edu>
wrote:

> > On Mar 19, 2019, at 12:49 PM, Jesse Sheidlower <jester at PANIX.COM> wrote:
> >
> > It's in the OED:
> >
> > 1918 J. Dos Passos _Jrnl._ 11 Nov. in _Fourteenth Chron._ (1973) 229
> Talk is mainly of seasickness and the possibility of French jazz.
> >
> > OED also has a 1920 example of the verb in a sexual sense.
>
> For those without access to the OED, here’s the latter cite:
>
> 1920   A. C. Inman _Diary_ 14 Apr. in _Inman Diary_ (1985) I. 167   He had
> had sexual relations with her (in his slang ‘had jazzed her’).
>
> Pretty unambiguous.
> >
> >
> > On Tue, Mar 19, 2019 at 05:46:53PM +0100, Z Rice wrote:
> >> Porter states in his writeup on "jazz":
> >>
> >> "Although a similar evolution happened to the word “jazz,” which became
> >> slang for the act of sex, that did not happen until 1918 at the
> earliest."
> >>
> >> However, Porter doesn't mention what exactly the 1918 citation is or
> where
> >> it comes from. Does anyone have that information?
> >>
> >> Link to Porter's writeup:
> >>
> https://www.wbgo.org/post/where-did-jazz-word-come-follow-trail-clues-deep-dive-lewis-porter#stream/0
> >>

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