Crackerjack Fellow

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Curt. I’m calling from San Diego, California.

Welcome to the show. How can we help?

Well, I actually work at the San Diego County Regional Airport Authority, and we were having an off-site meeting with one of our divisions.

And we were talking about feedback, and one of the points of feedback that one of our customers gave the group was that they were Cracker Jack.

And one of the participants at the event turned to me and said, what is Cracker Jack?

Oh, really?

Yeah.

I had not heard it before.

And I said, I don’t know, but I grew up in Wisconsin. I used to get Cracker Jacks.

And I said, so in my mind, I think it means like hit or miss because you get those prizes.

And sometimes they’re good and sometimes they’re bad.

Right.

Sometimes you get the cheap little plastic figure and sometimes you get the magnifying glass, right?

Oh, but sometimes you get the whistle. Remember the whistle with two little notes?

But the magnifying glass was the one that I loved.

Oh, that was really cool.

But sometimes you get like this little crumbly…

A booklet or something.

Or the tattoos that didn’t work.

You’d lick them and stick them and then nothing happened.

It was just a piece of wet paper on your arm.

Completely.

And so in my mind, that’s what I thought it meant.

-huh.

But the irony is that I went home and I asked my partner, Nick, who trains horses and dressage.

-huh.

And he’s like, well, that doesn’t make sense because there’s an event production company called Cracker Jack Events.

And I’m like, okay.

Getting to the bottom of it now.

Yes.

So we did actually end up looking up the definition and obviously discovered that it meant someone who was brilliant or smart.

So I was curious where it came into the language and how about it’s used and how can I’ve never heard it before.

That’s interesting.

And it makes me wonder if other people have the same definition that you do in your head.

Right, where they thought that it meant to hit or miss instead of great or good.

It seems to me it comes from cracking, like something’s cracking good, right?

Yeah, we have that in a few words.

We have crack shot, right?

Oh, yeah, right.

We have a crack team.

Imagine like a heist movie with a crack team that breaks into the safe.

Yeah.

We have that in a few places.

And we first see it show up in the late 1800s in horse racing, I believe, where they talk about crackerjack horses.

So these, I believe, were horses who were fast off the mark.

As soon as the race started, they were right out of the gate, and there they were.

Wow.

But it’s soon quickly generalized, and you can find it almost sticks to sports for a really long time before it starts to be used for many other professions and just regular people who are just kind of awesome at just being alive.

Right, and associated with baseball for a long time because of the sugary treat, right?

Right, exactly.

Buy me some peanuts and Cracker Jack, right?

And the Cracker Jack, that came along, what, that’s more than 120 years now, right?

Yeah, it’s really old.

Wow.

Yeah, so…

Interesting.

It’s so fascinating in the beginning of it in horses, too, which my partner is a huge animal activist and cares very much for the animals, so he won’t go to horse racing.

So the jack, though.

That’s not a vocabulary.

We should explain the jack, though.

So the crack part means excellent, good, first class, first rate.

But the jack part refers to the generic term for a man.

So a jack or a jill, a jack is a man and a jill is a woman.

So crack jack, it has been used instead of cracker jack.

So a crack jack is a great man, a good man.

Very good at his job.

So your partner will like that too, right?

Yeah.

And so it is a good name for a business.

Good to know.

The next time I get some feedback, I’ll come a Cracker Jack, I guess.

There you go.

Well, Kurt, thanks for calling.

Absolutely.

Thanks for helping.

Take care now.

Bye-bye.

Bye.

Good question.

Out of the workplace.

It’s funny because this is where we spend eight to ten hours a day, right?

Yeah.

In the workplace.

In the workplace.

And this is where we pick up a lot of language.

Yes.

And a lot of disputes.

Call us with your stories from the workplace, 877-929-9673, or send them an email to words@waywordradio.org.