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Last month Miss Poubelle discussed bukakke, a Japanese porno genre in which a woman is covered with load after load of sperm. Trolling through the web site connected to this type of video, Miss Poubelle was struck by how many heterosexual porno sites specialize in videos where men spurt onto women's faces. In English-speaking pornography, these are typically known as facials. Again and again, the facial sites promise babes drenched in jizz or juicy jism shots. After spending a bit of time looking at these sites, Miss Poubelle had the urge to go wash her face quite carefully. But she also found herself wondering about the history of these words jizz and jism.

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The Oxford English Dictionary says that jizz and jism have an "unknown origin." (And the word seems to have more spellings that any other Miss Poubelle can think of, including jizz, jism, gizz, gizm, gism, gissum, jissom, chism, chissum, jizzum, and jisum.) The earliest entry for jism is from an 1842 publication: "At the drawgate Spicer tried it on again, but his horse was knocked up "the gism" and the starch was effectively taken out of him by the long and desperate struggles he had been obliged to maintain." In this quote the sense is evidently something like "spirit" or "energy." That is, the horse's energy had evaporated.

In 1899, chism was noted in a dictionary of Virginia dialect words with the meaning "seminal fluid," but it was not until 1955 that this sense appeared in print again. Citations from the early part of the 20th century continue to use the word in the sense "energy, spirit." A 1937 citation, for instance, has the following dialogue "'Step on it, will you?' 'Sure... All right,.. but put a little jism into it, will you?'"

Miss Poubelle thinks it safe to say that this meaning for jism is obsolete. The last citation in the OED with jism meaning "energy, spirit" is from 1942, and all the references after that refer to sperm.

Wondering where this very odd word had come from, Miss Poubelle first thought that there might be some connection to juice. We sometimes use juice to mean "energy," and juice also seems like a natural word for sperm. But unfortunately the sound changes involved don't make much sense. Juice ends with an /s/ sound, while jizz ends with a /z/. The vowels are also different, and then there's the added /m/ at the end of many of the versions.

A better hypothesis, as it turns out, is an etymology that derives these words from Jesus! Here's the way it would work. Because of the biblical command against taking the name of the Lord in vain, English speakers have a long history of substituting corrupted or slightly altered versions of religious words. Linguists call it taboo deformation. For example, instead of God, we have gosh and golly. Instead of god-damned, we find goll-durned and gosh-darned. Instead of Jesus or Jesus Christ we have gee, geez, gee whiz, gee whillikers, jeepers, jeepers creepers, judas priest, and jeesum crow, to name a few. In older English, we also have a euphemism for Jesus where the first vowel is the short /i/ by gis. And note that at least one of these euphemisms, jeesum, has an extra /m/ added.

Since the earliest uses of jizz mean "energy" or "spirit," it's not to hard to see how Jesus might have an appropriate meaning. In the 1842 quote above, the writer meant that the spirit had gone out of the horse. Wouldn't it seem plausible for some speakers to use a form of Jesus to mean "spirit"? And once the word means "spirit" or "energy," there's a natural connection to the product of sexual energy, semen. So when speakers talk about someone who is drenched in jizz, what they are saying is literally "soaking in Jesus." (What a baptism!)

Of course, most English speakers now don't think of Jesus when they hear the word jism. But Miss Poubelle takes a bit of pleasure at contemplating the peculiar linguistic history that brings together both the religious and the sexual manifestations of the spirit.