Jackpot Origin

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Oh, hi. Thanks for taking my call.

Sure. Who’s this?

Janice from Jericho, Vermont.

Well, welcome to the show. How can we help you?

I have a question about the word jackpot, which I always thought meant, you know, I always heard it mean something like, you know, you win a prize, something great happens, you hit the jackpot.

And back in the late 60s, I started working with racehorses at Belmont Park Racetrack in New York. And several times I’ve heard people there refer to jackpot as something like getting into trouble. You know, like if you had trouble with the police, you were in a bit of a jackpot.

And then I’ve never seen it on the Internet used in that way. I tried looking it up. But interestingly, I was just reading a book a couple of days ago that uses jackpot in that connotation. And it’s kind of a book about South Boston police and politicians back in the 70s, which were predominantly Irish.

And thinking about the racetrack, the first few times I did hear it used that way, it was from Irish guys who had come over to the U.S. to work with the horses. So I’m kind of wondering if that’s something from Europe, that connotation.

Well, the clues that you’ve given us are interesting, but they’re red herrings. The horse racing in the Irish are just coincidental to your learning of it, but not really important to the history of the word jackpot.

And this meaning of the word jackpot actually goes back to the very earliest days of jackpot when it was a new word. It referred to a new kind of poker where in order to open the bidding, you had to have two jacks. And so the money in the middle of the table kept getting larger until somebody had two jacks and could start the bidding just for that one kind of poker.

So in the 1860s, probably earlier, the word jackpot really starts to be common. It shows up in police journals where people are reporting on gambling crimes or certain kinds of embezzlement related to it. And the word jackpot really has this kind of mystery around it in the early days because sometimes it’s just legitimately a gambling word. But other times it’s not really clear what they mean.

Where do they mean somebody spent all of his wages at the table playing jackpot or trying to get the jackpot, and that’s the tangle that he got into? But it really starts to settle out with these two different tributaries, the meaning of jackpot, one referring to just a big pot of money that you win, another referring to different kinds of trouble, including in the logging business, where a jackpot even today is a tangle of logs, either on the ground or in the water, something you’ve got to clear up before you can pass.

I’ve just only heard the track. I’ve never heard anyone else use it as something negative.

I’m not surprised. The track is still this wonderful place. For somebody like me that likes to wallow in slang, the track is a really great place to go because some of this stuff just continues to persist. The gamblers use it without a second thought. They’re not doing it in a knowing, winking way. That slang is just a part of the business.

It’s interesting. In rodeo lingo, to be jackpotted is to be sort of all cut up, tied up with a fallen steer or a fallen horse. There we go. Your legs mixed up with theirs. And that kind of goes nicely with the tangled up logs and branches that you find in logging.

Yeah, just a big mess. Forestry, yeah. A big mess in general. Right, exactly. A big mess.

But anyway, yeah, so what happens is we just have these two persistent meanings of jackpot that kind of have continued on their own separate paths since the very beginning of that particular kind of gambling.

Yeah, so it’s interesting because I had never heard it until I went to the racetrack, and I’ve really never heard it used that way since.

How’d you do with the horses?

Nobody ever wins, you know.

Well, you’re not a stupor, are you? The horse always wins. You’re not a stupor, are you, running around picking up tickets people have thrown down just to see if they threw down a winner?

Oh, there’s all kinds of scams going on at the racetrack, let me tell you, all kinds. Sometimes the trainers are the most surprised when a horse wins.

Right, because you might be in the business for other reasons, right?

Exactly. Well, most of them are in there for the bet. It’s all about gambling.

All right. Thanks a lot for calling.

Yeah, thanks for your answers. I appreciate it.

Yeah, sure.

Bye.

Bye-bye.

All right, bye.

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