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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, lexicographer, and Wall Street Journal language columnist Ben Zimmer. The Oxford English Dictionary, which dates “jerk,” an American colloquialism, back to 1935, reports: “Originally: an inept or pathetic person; a fool. Now: an objectionable or obnoxious person.” Green’s Dictionary of Slang, which traces “jerk” back to 1934, defines its original meaning as “a fool, an idiot, a failure.”
He goes into the change in some detail, and it makes fascinating reading, but here’s the part that grabbed my attention and made me post it:
Here’s the sort of spooky thing. It’s not just that there are multiple generations who’ve never known a “jerk” was once a simpleton or sap. It’s that some of the folks who used to use it that way don’t remember that they did. When I asked my mom to define the word this week, she used the modern meaning, with no apparent recollection of her former firm conviction that a jerk was a dope, dodo, or dimwit. Did someone Neuralyze my mom, or have I become a jerk truther? My mom isn’t the only boomer who may have revised their history of this specific subject. You can trace the ascendance of the asshole strain of jerk through the writing of Pulitzer Prize–winning columnist and humorist Dave Barry, who’s between my mom and Martin in age. In Stay Fit and Healthy Until You’re Dead (1985), Barry wrote, “How many bones do you think your skeletal system has? Would you say 50? 150? 250? 300? More than 300? If you guessed 50, you’re a real jerk.” In Dave Barry Turns 40 (1990), he wrote, “So your financial situation is a mess. Okay, fine. The important thing is—don’t be discouraged. There’s no reason to get down on yourself, just because you’ve been an unbelievable jerk.” But by 1996—the year of “Show me the money”—he was using the modern meaning in a column headlined, “What It Takes to Be a Jerk.” When I brought this to Barry’s attention and asked him how the great redefinition of jerk may have happened, he wrote, “I always thought jerk meant asshole. At least I thought I always thought that, although the quotes you cite seem to suggest otherwise. So to answer your question: I have no idea. You may be right!” […] A little light searching suggests I’m not the only amateur etymologist to lose their lexical bearings over the near-forgotten former meaning of “jerk.” “When did jerk stop meaning stupid?” a Redditor asked in 2021 (ironically, on the NoStupidQuestions subreddit). Others have seemed similarly unnerved by how the word went from signifying one thing to signifying something else so suddenly, within living memory, as everyone who used to use it the old way overwrote the old definition. There’s a sense of suddenly standing on shaky ground: Am I fluent in this language, or have I Englished wrong all along? How can we communicate if “jerk” meant nitwit in 1982 but not in 1996?
Reader, I too am such a boomer. When I started reading the column I thought jerk had always meant ‘asshole’ to me (even if it wasn’t quite as harsh), but as I went along I realized that no, I used to use it in the “dummy” sense but had somehow forgotten that fact. On the one hand, I’m glad it’s not just me, but on the other… it’s weird and unsettling!