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I recently watched a Danish film with subtitles. One of the lines was translated to English as "you don't know JACK SHIT". Okay, two questions here: Is there a saying in Danish that means "jack shit" and where does that phrase come from?
Which, of course leads one to wonder about the A in "f*&king A" and the H in Jesus H..
Anyone know the origins of these?
Thank you.
I wish I had a better answer to any of those questions, curious, but here is the best I have to offer. The jack in jack shit seems to have unknown provenance, but it may be a phenomenon of the widespread use of jack as an intensifier simply because the word jack has a pleasing or fun sound. See, e.g., Bill Bryson, Made in America: An Informal History of the English Language in the United States 269 (1994) (noting the same uncertain provenance for jackpot and listing numerous other words in which jack seems to have no real meaning). If that were true, then the meaning of the phrase seems to come entirely from the word shit, which could have a slang meaning as "something worthless" or "of no consequence". I have nothing to show when it was first used, though it seems to have originated in the U.S.
As for Jesus H. Christ, it, too, seems to have an uncertain provenance, but one scholar suggested that it might have come from the Greek monogram for Jesus: IHC. Roger Smith, The H of Jesus H. Christ, 69 American Speech 331 (1994). That seems a little too complicated to me, but I'm no scholar in the area, so I'll have to defer to those who know. That said, it seems that it would be another one of those euphonious intensifiers (just like I suggested jack shit might be). Something just sounds better about saying "JEE-zus AECH KRIST", with those three punctuated emphases. Anyway, that's what I've got; I'm sure someone else can find something better.
I'm not sure how "IHC" could mean Jesus, unless it's just that they're the first three letters of his name. In the Greek New Testament, they spelled his name Ιησοῦς (Iesous, emphasis on the second syllable). That's iota, eta, sigma, omikron, upsilon, sigma; the first three letters, Ιης-, in all-caps are ΙΗΣ, only the sigma when hand-written can look like the English letter 'C'.
I'm with you, though, that seems like a stretch. I just assumed, when I first heard it, that someone just made up a middle initial to make the oath sound more emphatic.
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