The forgotten meaning of "jerk"
by Ben Lindbergh at the Ringer asks “When did jerk stop meaning ‘stupid’?” He starts with the Steve Martin movie The Jerk, saying of its protagonist: Navin is oblivious, not obnoxious. He’s ignorant, not intolerant. He’s naive, not intentionally cruel. He’s a bumpkin, a rube, and a moron, maybe, but a jerk? For the most part, no, I wouldn’t say so. There he is, of course, using the current sense of jerk: “There’s definitely been a semantic shift in ‘jerk’ over the years,” says linguist, lexi