Loose Lips	Loose Lips Archive

In her daily life, Miss Poubelle occasionally has the misfortune to encounter a person who can only be described as a jerk. And by a jerk, she means, approximately, that the person is contemptible or disagreeable. In modern life, one can hardly avoid jerks, since so many industries seem to be breeding-grounds for them. The unavoidable jerkiness of being has even given rise to a web site, where users can write in with complaints about the jerks that they have to deal with in their daily comings and goings.

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But Miss Poubelle suspects that most of the people who bemoan the jerks all around them have not given much thought to the origin of the word. It is rather transparently derived from the verb jerk off, and it probably harks back to the old stereotypes that masturbation will make you stupid, blind, and insane. What is surprising is that the two words seem to have parted company over time, with jerk-off still vaguely tabooed while jerk is entirely respectable. Steven Martin's 1979 movie The Jerk used the term with no public criticism, but the movie would have earned an R rating if it had been titled The Jerk Off. Despite its origins, jerk doesn't seem to have any residual sexual connotations attached to it.

Both jerk and jerk off are first attested around 1935. Given the basic meaning of the verb jerk, which is something like "make short, abrupt motions," it is relatively easy to see how this verb could come to be applied to (male) masturbation. After all, the hand tends to jerk back and forth while in the act. (Miss Poubelle is unfamiliar with the use of jerk off to describe female masturbatory practices, but she would be delighted to hear from any readers who use the term in this way.)

A precisely parallel relationship holds between the words wank and wanker, which are mostly British terms. To wank is to masturbate, and a wanker is a contemptible person, i.e. a jerk. The connection between the two is brought out nicely in the following quote from Kingsley Amis's 1987 novel Jake's Thing: "Damon, what's a wanker?"... "These days a waster, a shirker, someone who's fixed himself a soft job or an exalted position by means of an undeserved reputation on which he now coasts." "Oh. Nothing to do with tossing off, then?" "Well, connected with it, yes, but more metaphorical than literal."

Miss Poubelle does not have an absolutely firm grasp on all the nuances of the British wanker, but it is her impression that it differs slightly from the American jerk. Most instances of wanker seem to refer to men who are ineffectual, lazy, or worthless-- whereas most jerks appear to be more actively disagreeable, rude, or insulting to others.

While people held archaic notions about the wickedness and danger of masturbation, it was perhaps natural that a term for those who engaged in the practice might become a synonym for a contemptible person. But with the enormous changes in attitudes towards masturbation, Miss Poubelle now finds herself suspicious of any relatively healthy person who doesn't masturbate from time to time. It seems to suggest some unhealthy attitudes towards sex, probably due to outmoded religious views. It is a delicious linguistic irony that the men who are most likely to abstain from jerking off-- the pope, Jerry Falwell, John Cardinal O'Connor-- have become in the process some of the world's biggest jerks.