Why “Jet Black” Comes from Stone, Not Aircraft

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi there, how are you?

Good, who is this?

This is Temple from Dallas, Texas.

Hi Temple, welcome to the show.

Hi Temple.

Thank you, thank you for taking my call.

Sure, what can we help with?

Well, I’m wondering, I’ve heard a phrase most of my life, and I’m just wondering where it came from, jet black, whether it refers to hair or another object that’s black. Where did the term jet black come from?

Well Temple, what piqued your curiosity about this?

Well, I come from a family of toeheads, and one of my nieces married into a family of Italian and Israeli descent, and she recently had a baby, and it was described to me as she has jet black hair. So now that it’s close to home, I’d like to know where that came from.

What do your instincts tell you? Got any guesses?

Well, no, I really don’t. I had two black roommates when I was in college, and they would read the Jet magazine, and of course I thought Jet Black, but I doubt that’s it, but that’s the closest I could come up with.

Yeah, for years I thought it had to do with Jet planes, you know, Jet exhaust or the skid marks they leave on the runway like that black.

Right, right.

There is a pretty clear explanation for this. Jet is a material that’s a kind of coal, and its name goes back all the way back to ancient Greek. It comes to us via French, but it goes back to ancient Greek to the name of an area of Syria where it was very plentiful in antiquity. So it’s a kind of material.

Yeah, it was treated as a semi-precious material that you could carve and polish. You might, say, make chess pieces or jewelry out of it. And it’s one of a small set of words that we use for, like, we talk about ruby red or we talk about heart as a diamond. There are a few little expressions or idioms that we have in English that are connected to stones, and that’s one of them.

But in modern English, we know the jet plane far more than we know the jet the rock. And it’s spelled the same.

Yeah, spelled the same, but two completely different roots.

Right, yeah, it comes to us through French and through Latin and from a term from Asia Minor.

Well, very interesting. I’m glad to know that. And as I understand it, the Jet magazine is named for Jet Black. And it comes from a period in American history where the Black Pride movement was strong and Black is beautiful. And they took the name to not only indicate the color black, but the modernness and the forward-thinkingness and the kind of a progressive attitude that they wanted to take and demonstrate to their readers.

Well, that’s, yeah, so I was kind of on the right trail, but I didn’t go back far enough, I guess.

Exactly. And Temple, you said that you’re a towhead?

I come from a family of towheads. I’m not towhead anymore. It’s more gray. But, yeah, all my brothers and sisters were born very blonde.

Yeah, that’s an interesting one, too. Toehead. Do you know the origin of that?

I sure do not.

Well, you know, sometimes people write us and they spell it T-O-E, toehead. But you don’t look like that.

No, no.

Gnarly little nubbins on the top of your head or anything.

Yeah.

But toe is an old word for flax. So it’s like flaxen-haired and coal-haired.

Oh, okay.

Flaxen-haired. We mean yellow or blonde or almost a blonde white, right?

Yeah.

Okay, very good.

Okay, very interesting.

Thanks for calling, Temple.

Thank you very much.

Take care. Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

The other jet, by the way, as to jet engine or to jettison something comes from the French word to throw.

Right.

Very different etymologies.

Right. Farther back all the way to Latin and all those words like interject and trajectory and all those throwing words.

Yes.

This is one of the reasons English is confusing is because we have words that sound the same and look the same but have completely different histories. It’s like you know two people named Susan. They’re not from the same family at all, right?

Take an example. Yeah, yeah.

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