Live data from Hacker News

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

atlasobscura.com

31–40 of 55 posts

Re: The Enduring Mystery of 'Jawn', Philadelphia's All-Purpose Noun

#31
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Curious, what are the other all purpose slang words?

I knew a group of friends who would use the word "donkey" for many many things.

In parts of the west of england you can replace pretty much any word with "badger" and get away with it.

Re: The Enduring Mystery of 'Jawn', Philadelphia's All-Purpose Noun

#32
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Curious, what are the other all purpose slang words?

Not the parent poster, but in Ireland there's "yoke" meaning 'a thing whose name one cannot recall, does not know, or does not wish to specify. "how much did that yoke set you back?"'

See also "wossname."

Re: The Enduring Mystery of 'Jawn', Philadelphia's All-Purpose Noun

#34
post #20

A cool word I probably overuse is "sketch", which I've only ever known to be used on the West coast. I'm in Vegas, which is landlocked in the desert but we seem to be a bit of an extension of The Left Coast, Vegas being the only blue region of Nevada. As far as I can tell the word percolated down to us through alt and underground culture, primarily hitting my network through early 2000's trading of skateboard VHS tap…

Live near Toronto, Ontario. Definitely heard 'Man that is just sketch' a lot. Probably more widespread than you think given the other responses.

Re: The Enduring Mystery of 'Jawn', Philadelphia's All-Purpose Noun

#35
post #30

These articles on "jawn" always miss the use of "the jawn" which works in a manner similar to saying something is "the shit." In other words, the phrase "That jawn is the jawn" is a valid sentence, meaning "That thing is the best." Stuff like this is why I think "jawn" is the fuckin' jawn.

I met a guy from Philly who over used "the jawn" so much we started calling him John. He was also often caught uttering phrases like "I'm from Philly yo"

I once played chess against a guy who used this word for just about everything. He made his move while I wasn't watching, I turned around and asked him what he did.

"I took your jawn with my jawn." I said "which one is John?" He said "They're all jawn."

From then on, every time I spoke to him I replaced every noun with "John." Surprisingly, even without nouns, we never had much difficulty understanding each other.

Re: The Enduring Mystery of 'Jawn', Philadelphia's All-Purpose Noun

#37
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I knew a group of friends who would use the word "donkey" for many many things.

In parts of the west of england you can replace pretty much any word with "badger" and get away with it.

Wait, did 'Badger, Mushroom, Snake' have an actual plot that the rest of us just didn't understand?

Re: The Enduring Mystery of 'Jawn', Philadelphia's All-Purpose Noun

#38
post #12
post #2

dont understand the mystery that is attributed to 'jawn' in this article. I have known a couple slang words in my own lifetime that have been used in an all purpose manner similar to 'jawn', the only real difference is that jawn manages to remain stable, most of these generic slangs fade out relatively quickly because they are pretty much meaningless...

Agreed. I was surprised that the article didn't mention the Hawaiian Pidgin expression "da kine"[1], which functions similarly to "jawn". Funnily enough, the da kine Wikipedia page makes the same claim regarding uniqueness of expression. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Da_kine

I came here looking for a mention of da kine.

>According to experts, it's unlike any word, in any language.

Some experts. I kept reading looking for a reason why it was substantially different from da kine, and the more I read, the more familiar the description sounded.

Post reply on HN