Jawn

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Daniel from Sheridan, Wyoming.

Welcome to the show, Daniel. How can we help?

Well, I’ve got a question about some jargon that I learned out in Philadelphia.

Okay.

Okay.

And that is the word John.

John!

That’s J-A-W-N.

Oh my goodness.

J-A-W-N.

It had to be John, right? It couldn’t be a food word.

It couldn’t be, no. There’s lots of strange words out there, but this one in particular I thought was odd.

What were you doing in Philadelphia where you picked up the word John?

I lived out there for a couple of years, actually.

Okay.

Okay.

So tell us about this word.

What kind of context did you hear it in?

I think most often it’s kind of a placeholder for thing, but it seems kind of wide and arbitrary.

So I guess, for example, I worked with a moving company out there, and if we were getting ready to move a couch, I could ask my co-worker,

We’re going to move this couch.

Go get the john and we’ll cover it up, which would mean the couch cover.

Yeah, that’s consistent with what I’ve heard as well.

And it’s used to such a degree in Philadelphia now that they kind of almost have an ownership on it.

But there are people in New Jersey who use it and throughout Pennsylvania.

But it’s what I call the chamber of commerce words.

And it becomes so known as a word belonging to a place that everyone kind of keeps reinforcing its use by continuing to use it because they’re from that place.

It’s very weird.

But that’s how we behave with language.

And it probably, get this, Daniel, it probably comes from the word joint, J-O-I-N-T.

Do you ever watch any Spike Lee films?

Well, sure.

On the beginning of the films, he’ll put the credits that say, you know, whatever, Mississippi Masala, a Spike Lee joint.

And what he means is it’s a Spike Lee project, a Spike Lee thing, a Spike Lee show.

And so there’s got this word joint existing throughout the Northeast since the early 1980s to mean a thing, a show, a production, a group, a crew, a team, all these different kind of variety of things.

And it becomes corrupted through the lanition of the final sound.

That T sound is kind of joint or jaunt, and it becomes jaunt.

This is the theory.

And this is a normal kind of English slang process where a word becomes corrupted.

And so it’s got similar meanings as jaunt as joint, but it’s just pronounced differently.

Oh, that’s interesting.

Yeah, right?

How old is that then?

Early 80s.

How old is joint and how old is John?

Early 80s.

Yeah, this particular use of joint is at least the early 80s, and John is a little older than that.

I found John as early as 1992.

I’m sure it’s much older than that.

It’s just that it takes a while for slang to show up in print.

Huh.

That’s really interesting.

Yeah, I thought so too.

And again, there’s just a huge sense of ownership with that word.

People from Philadelphia in particular feel like if somebody’s using that word incorrectly

On a scripted television show or movies,

But the comment section just explodes.

They just get crazy about how the injustice

Has been done to this slang word.

It’s pretty funny.

Well, there was one that I didn’t feel comfortable

Using out there until I’d been there for a while either.

And I usually use it kind of tongue-in-cheek,

Which I think most people do out there now as well.

It’s really interesting.

And so do you use it in Wyoming now?

No, I do not use it in Wyoming.

I’m going to leave that one in Philly, I think.

All right. Well, cheers, Daniel. Thanks for calling.

Thanks so much, guys.

All right. Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Language is some crazy stuff, Martha.

It’s some crazy stuff.

And you used the word lenition.

I’m hearing the Latin word for soft in there, L-E-N-I-T-I-O-N.

I love doing that.

I just talk about something like slang and throw in the jargon, too.

Yeah, lenition.

So joint, kind of the T sound, becomes softer.

It becomes join or john, something like that.

And it gets quickly corrupted because it’s primarily transmitted mouth to ear.

Right.

This is what we know from English.

When words are transmitted off of paper, they corrupt very fast.

Very quickly, yeah.

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