Hyun Jeong An was the bank "Relationship Manager" I met this week. Her business card says she likes to be known as "Carmen."
A new coffee shop has opened on Beaverton-Hillsdale highway. I think it must be headquartered somewhere in the south, for only in my crummy version of such accents can I get the pun "human bean" to work.
There is a gap between the original word in Quechua "charqui," and "jerk." The O.E.D. says this is Captain John Smith's fault; he wrote in 1612, "jerkin" for "ccharqui." Darwin used the original term, writing it, "charqui." I'm still unclear how Jamaican spiced meat and thin strips of meat cut into pieces and dried came to be called Jerk and Jerky. Categorical confusion; because jerked meat was sometimes spiced, any kind of spiced meat came in Jamaica to be called jerk?
In slang uses, when a tongue lashing might be sharp as a whip, witty retorts were called jerks. To jerk a gybe was to forge a license. A jerker was an elbow bender or drinker, or a harlot. But it wasn't until the Second World War that the present American meaning of jerk came into being. Partridge's Dictionary of Slang fixes the year as 1943. At that time Australians were still using the term to describe custard.
Custard chicken anyone? David Ritchie, Portland, Oregon ------------------------------------------------------------------ To change your Lit-Ideas settings (subscribe/unsub, vacation on/off, digest on/off), visit www.andreas.com/faq-lit-ideas.html
