"The Enduring Mystery Of 'Jawn', Philadelphia's All-Purpose Noun"

"Linguists have long been fascinated by the peculiar mid-Atlantic mutations of words like “water” and “creek” (in Philadelphia parlance: “wooder” and “crick”) and an unusual lexicon that includes words like hoagie and jimmies (sub sandwich and sprinkles as on ice cream, respectively), but nothing has captivated them quite like “jawn.”

The word “jawn” is unlike any other English word. In fact, according to the experts that I spoke to, it’s unlike any other word in any other language. It is an all-purpose noun, a stand-in for inanimate objects, abstract concepts, events, places, individual people, and groups of people. It is a completely acceptable statement in Philadelphia to ask someone to “remember to bring that jawn to the jawn.”...

Ben Zimmer, a linguist and language columnist who’s written and talked about “jawn” before, agrees, writing in an email that “‘jawn’ evidently developed as a Philly variant of ‘joint’ in the '80s,” following the release of the popular 1981 single “That’s The Joint” by Funky Four Plus One, an early hip-hop group from the Bronx... Usually semantic bleaching works like that, little chips at the word’s original meaning. But joint/jawn, in Philly, has come to be so broad as to encompass basically anything...

White Philadelphians, notes Jones, are quick to note that they too use the word jawn, and that it’s a Philly thing and not just a black Philly thing. The data from the Philadelphia Neighborhood Corpus is a little too outdated, Jones thinks, to make a definitive statement either way, but he opined white Philadephians seemed to use it in a more limited way, not really exploring its full breadth and range...

A possibility is that the mutation happened in such an extreme way because Philadelphia is, in some ways, an extreme kind of place. A recent feature from 538 placed Philadelphia as the fourth-most racially segregated major city in the country, behind only Chicago, Atlanta, and Milwaukee. Jones says that it’s possible that Philadelphia’s segregation encouraged the changing and adoption of jawn; black Philadelphians and white Philadelphians don’t mingle nearly as much as, say, black New Yorkers and white New Yorkers, so a word created or altered in the black community can develop without outside influence."

http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/the-enduring-mystery-of-jawn-philadelphias-allpurpose-noun

Woah.