Friday words #313

My starting point this week was what I thought was a pretty simple term: newsjacking. When I encountered the word, I thought that it probably was derived from hijacking, and I got curious about that term. Investigating the word jack took me in many interesting directions. Let’s see if I can do a quick roundup.

To start, Jack is a man’s name that comes from French Jacque (Latin Jacob), but also somehow is a nickname for John. This Jacques-Jack-John name is so common that it became a kind of generic term, “a representative of the common or ordinary people” (OED). We see this in various names and expressions like Jack Sprat, Jack Frost, Jack-in-the-Box, and Jack and Jill. If you’ve ever wondered why it was Jack the Ripper, that’s why: it was a generic name, like John Doe.

The term jack-of-all-trades also derives from this generic sense of Jack, “especially a young man of the lower classes,” per Douglas Harper, who notes that it can be used “familiarly or contemptuously.” Jack was a word for a sailor, and this generic-Jack name is probably the origin of words like lumberjack. In French, jacques also underwent a kind of pejoration, becoming a word for a peasant, which is a possible origin for the word jacket, the garment.

We extended the generic Jack name for males of the animal kingdom as well, and to describe animals that are small. Thus we have a jackass, which is a male donkey, and jack for various male birds, like the kestrel. There’s a jackdaw, which refers to a small bird, and jack to refer to the immature males of some fish, like salmon. Then there’s a jackrabbit (actually a hare), which got its name because it has donkey-like ears. Folks from the western US undoubtedly know about jackalopes.

One origin that I was particularly curious about was how we got the word jack to mean a tool for lifting things, like the jack that you have (I hope) in your car’s trunk. This sense also seems to be an extension of Jack as a name. As Douglas Harper puts it, the name Jack was “extended to various appliances which do the work of common servants.” These appliances include the jack for lifting, a jackknife (a foldable knife, possibly based on the “sailor” sense, whence the verb to jackknife), a bootjack for removing your boots, a jackhammer, and maybe a blackjack (a weighted sap for hitting people with). The extension of jack to servants’ tools might be the origin of jackboot, a type of boot that covers the lower leg and that’s often associated with the military.

This one surprised me: an electrical jack (like plug and jack) derives from spring jack switch because the original patent described a plug that worked a spring-loaded version of a jackknife switch. (If you don’t know what a jackknife switch is, picture the switch stereotypically used in Frankenstein’s lab in the movies.)

The noun jack for the lifting tool spawned the verb to jack (up), meaning “to raise.” This in turn gave us metaphoric senses, like jacking up (i.e., raising) prices, connotatively in a stealing-like way. (Hold that thought.)

Monterey Jack cheese (“taco cheese” at our house) is named for David Jacks, who first produced it in Monterey County, California in the 1880s. His surname presumably goes back in some way to the common name Jack.

In playing cards, the first court card is the jack. This figure was known originally as the knave, but in the 1800s, playing card decks in the U.S. started using J for Jack instead of Kn for Knave, a term that had developed bad connotations. Card play featuring the jack gave us the name blackjack for the game of 21, of course. The word jackpot came from a version of poker where players ante, but betting must open with at least a pair of jacks else the players ante again and get new hands. The idea of winning this growing pot then transferred to other games, particularly slots, from which we get the expression hit the jackpot.

The game jacks, also known as jackstones or knucklebones, has no connection to the name Jack or to knaves. Instead, it’s a variation of check-stones, which has some connection to the word checker(s), which ultimately comes from an Old French word for a chessboard.

Moving along to verbs. We have the verb to jack, which means “to steal.” The verb to hijack means “to steal, commandeer,” specifically something that’s being transported. One story is that hijack is a combination of highway + jacker (“one who steals”). Another is that the verb to jack is a back-formation from hijack, which the OED lists as “origin unknown.” To hijack goes back only to about 1920 in the US, so it’s a comparatively recent word.

The verb hijack expanded somewhat. You can hijack a truck, of course, but you can also hijack a car, an airplane, and even a conversation. Because hijack broadened, we developed specific -jack alternatives like carjack and skyjack.

These days, you can use the -jack ending to form all sort of compounds that refer to stealing. In the world of computers, there’s pagejacking (illegally cloning a page to try to lure traffic), bluejacking (sending unsolicited messages via Bluetooth), and clickjacking (“stealing” clicks on a page via a hidden link).

And now finally back to newsjacking. I got this term from Josh Bernoff’s blog entry about writing blog posts “for influence.” He defines newsjacking as “looking for news events and then jumping on them with your own perspective.”

I said earlier that newsjacking reminded me of hijacking, and as we’ve seen, the ‑jack ending has wide use to make compounds meaning “to steal.” However, I don’t read newsjacking as having a sense of stealing. If you squint, you can kind of see a sense of “to commandeer,” I suppose—to repurpose something to your own ends.

That said, writing about current events, even to give them your own spin, doesn’t seem negative to me. For example, Ben Zimmer’s weekly Word on the Street column in the Wall Street Journal examines a word that’s in the news. (Last week’s word was raid and this week’s word is fatwa.) You could call that newsjacking, but it seems the opposite of negative to me.

Still, looking into all of these senses of jack was quite a learning experience. I didn’t even talk about a bunch of others that I encountered, like to jack around, to jack someone up, the Union Jack, a jacklight, jack-in-the-pulpit, jackfruit, applejack, and jack shit among others. Something I can definitely say (predictably) is that jacking around with all of these meanings hijacked my whole evening.

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