JAY-WALKING
[Q] From Marty Ryerson; related questions came from Matthias Werner, Fred A Roth, Richard Hacker, Robert L Hamm and Dalia Wolfson: “When someone crosses the street in a city illegally, it’s called jay-walking. This usually means crossing at a point other than the intersection. What does the J stand for, or who is Jay? What is the origin of this term?”
[A] It has been said that people who take their lives in their hands in the big city by crossing the street anywhere dodge across in the pattern of a letter J — hence J-walking. Do not believe this.
The experts are sure the jay is the bird, one of the American jays, presumably the common blue jay. From around the last quarter of the nineteenth century, jay had been a slang term in North America for a stupid, gullible, ignorant, or provincial person, a rustic, bumpkin or simpleton. I would guess it refers to the noisy chattering of these conversational birds. The jay that I sometimes see on country walks, the European species, belongs in the genus Garrulus and garrulous is just the right word for it — jay was an insulting term for a foolish chattering person back in the 1500s. It’s not hard to see how country cousins, unversed to city ways, could have had this well-established sobriquet attached to them by supercilious metropolitans when they cluelessly wandered across a busy street or hopped about dodging the traffic.
In the second decade of the twentieth century we begin to see references in US papers to jaywalkers, usually because city councils are passing ordinances to stop pedestrians crossing the street anywhere they like. The earliest I’ve so far found is from February 1912 in a periodical called The Survey, reporting on restrictions proposed in Kansas City. Numerous others turn up in newspapers the following year: in Washington DC in March, in Fort Wayne, Indiana, in June (in a report which defines a jaywalker as “an alleged human being who crosses the street at other points than the regular crossings”) and in October in Lincoln, Nebraska. These show the term had quite suddenly become widely distributed and fairly common. I would guess that it had been around for some time in the spoken language and private usage. It would seem to be the rapid increase in motorised traffic that had led to the epithet and the regulations against jaywalking.
The Nebraska appearance was in an open letter in the Lincoln Daily Star to the city commissioners from a disgruntled citizen of that town: “Dear Friends: Forget all about that ‘jaywalking’ ordinance, the very name of which insults every citizen. Give the people credit for having a grain of common sense, like yourselves, and of being able to take care of themselves, as they have heretofore managed to do without your grandmotherly help.” It had no effect — the ordinance became law the following month.
SHARE THIS ARTICLE
