When Audrey was growing up in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in the late 1990s, it seemed that everyone around her used the word jawn as an all-purpose substitute for other words, as in I took my jawn to the jawn and we had a bunch of jawns. Philadelphians proudly claim jawn as a local product, but in fact this term originated in New York City in the 1920s as joint, as in “a place where two people come together.” By the 1970s this sense of joint had morphed into “something that people do together,” as in the way movies by Spike Lee are described as a Spike Lee joint. Joint took on a host of other meanings, and, influenced by the local dialect of Philadelphia, morphed into jawn there. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Origin and Meaning of “Jawn””
Hello, you have A Way with Words.
Hi, this is Audrey. I’m calling from Ithaca, New York on a beautiful fall day.
Hi, Audrey. Welcome to the show.
Well, so I grew up in Philadelphia before moving to Ithaca for college and then staying here.
And I remember in about fourth grade, so about 1997, suddenly I realized that everyone around me in school was saying the word John all the time.
To replace every word and it it boggled my mind and I remember like my parents saying that it was wrong and that it was ruining the English language because you could replace anything with this word.
And it was true people would use the word John in in a single sentence like three times like I took my John to the John and we and we had a bunch of Johns and I and it was it was so surprising to me.
Will you spell that for us?
J-A-W-N.
So 1997 or so, you’re in the fourth grade.
This word pops up.
It’s new slang.
And you probably said it a lot, too.
I didn’t say it quite so much.
Honestly, there was a bit of a racial divide.
And I think I’ve done some research, and there still is.
I feel like the white kids kind of said it less in our segregated schools.
And we said it a little bit.
A little bit, but it was very pervasive, especially among black students.
All right, so you’re white yourself then?
I am white myself, yeah.
Okay.
In general, what happened with this word is, and a lot of people from Philly hate when this comes up, but it didn’t start in Philadelphia.
It started in New York City as the word joint, J-O-I-N-T.
Joint before that started in probably the 20s or 30s coming from the idea of a place where two people met in the same way the idea where two bones connect. So a joint would be a gin joint or a juke joint and so forth.
And then by the 1970s, joint had morphed to mean something that people do together, a business venture or an operation or a musical act.
You might remember of Spike Lee films often have a line on the screen, a Spike Lee joint, not a joint production, but just a joint.
And that means it’s his thing, his operation.
That’s the same joint that turned into the John in Philadelphia.
And so it turns out that there was some linguistic fieldwork being done in the early 1980s in Philadelphia.
And so we have, I say we, meaning the linguistic profession, has tape of a subject using the word John at about the time it was changing its meaning.
There was one young man who used it to mean a variety of different things, like he referred to different women.
He might say Puerto Rican joints or Irish joints to mean Puerto Rican women or Irish women.
He might use it to mean a physical place or a bag of chips or even his own genitals.
And then the dropping of the T from joint to get join kind of conforms to some of the way that Philly speech differs from New York City speech.
Yeah.
And so then we have John.
And so slang is weird.
It’s ephemeral and it tends to fluctuate.
And so this is a really classic slang word.
It’s so wonderful that we can trace its history over the last 40 years or so.
If we take it back to joint, it’s much older than that.
But as John, it’s about 40 years old.
And we can see that it became kind of this point of linguistic pride for people in Philadelphia.
And it’s become what I call a chamber of commerce word where John is just kind of known that it belongs to Philly.
And if you use it, you’re not from Philly.
People kind of cock an eyebrow at you and go, like, what are you pretending at?
You know?
Right.
So do you still use it, Audrey?
I don’t.
I’ve never used it that much myself.
But I actually know a couple of people living here in Ithaca from Philly who do use the word.
It really is like a secret language because you feel like you don’t know what someone’s talking about because it just replaces any noun.
Yeah, because you can use it as a placeholder or a collective noun to mean stuff or you can refer to a situation or a circumstance.
Like you could say, I’m not dating him. His whole John is like too much for me right now.
Or you can say it’s a plural.
It can like, what are all these Johns doing in this drawer?
Or you can do it as a zero plural.
I can’t open this drawer because of the John.
So it’s like it’s just like multiple kind of things happening with John.
Give me the John from the table so I can fix this.
John could be anything.
Could be a screwdriver or the centerpiece.
We don’t know.
Totally.
Audrey, thanks so much for sharing that with us.
Yeah, this was really fun.
I appreciate it.
All right.
Have a good one.
Take care.
Bye-bye.
Bye-bye.
