Alan in Columbia, South Carolina, says his family used the terms go juking and juking around to refer to hanging out with family and friends, moving around aimlessly, with no particular goal in mind. It’s related to the term juke, also spelled jook. In 1935, writer Zora Neal Hurston defined a jook as “a place where they sing, dance, gamble, love and compose ‘blues’ songs incidentally”—in other words, a place where lots of fun things happen. In Tennessee Williams’ play Orpheus Descending (Bookshop|Amazon), a character says, “I want you to go juking with me…that’s riding and stopping to drink and dance, and riding some more and stopping to drink and dance again, and after awhile you just stop to drink…and sometimes you stop drinking and go to a tourist cabin [with your girl].” There are similar-sounding words in West African languages to mean “living wickedly” that may well be the source of jook and juking. This is part of a complete episode.
In Hong Kong English, Add oil! means something like “Go on!” or “Go for it!” A recent addition to the Oxford English Dictionary, this expression of encouragement comes from Cantonese (加油 or gā yáu; rendered as jiāyóu from Mandarin) and draws on the...
A Green Bay Packers fan wonders why a quarterback who’s tackled is said to be sacked. The roots of the word sack as in “bag” goes back thousands of years, all the way to Akkadian, later spreading through Greek, Latin, and then to Romance and...
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