I think "jawn" in Philly isn't as unique in its flexibility as the article tries to make it out to be. In DC, "jont" is apparently just as flexible.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/therootdc/post/dc-slang...
The Enduring Mystery of 'Jawn', Philadelphia's All-Purpose Noun
51–55 of 55 posts
Re: The Enduring Mystery of 'Jawn', Philadelphia's All-Purpose Noun
#52Wooder and crick are dead on. Also unmentioned is "down a' shawr", meaning you're going to the shore, specifically New Jersey.
I hear crick as an alternative pronunciation all over the northeast.
Funny, I think of it as a midwestern kind of thing. My mom's family is from Wisconsin, and crick is to them standard pronunciation.
Re: The Enduring Mystery of 'Jawn', Philadelphia's All-Purpose Noun
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Funny "I took your jawn with my jawn" is what AlphaGo said to Lee Sedol after the first match
Re: The Enduring Mystery of 'Jawn', Philadelphia's All-Purpose Noun
#54The artificial language Lojban[1] expresses everything as predicates. For example, the word "benji" expresses the relationship "send", and it would have parameter slots around it for the sender (x1), the thing being sent(x2), the receiver (x3), the origin (x4) and the medium (x5).
Lojban uses the word "zo'e" in the same way as jawn, to indicate an unspecified parameter in a predicate. This way you can skip over a parameter or emphasize it without specifying it. (Usually this isn't needed because x1 and x2 are most used and come right before and after the relationship word. Also, there are ways to reorder the parameters.)
There is also "co'e", which is the word for an unspecified relationship.
Re: The Enduring Mystery of 'Jawn', Philadelphia's All-Purpose Noun
#55Earlier quoted context omitted.
The "mystery" in the title is just utter clickbait. The article itself (which is pretty good if you enjoy this sort of thing) explains precisely where the term came from! No mystery at all. It's an offshoot of "joint" which has been around in various forms for decades.
The mystery is why it is so imbued with elitism, secrecy, and tradition
There's no secrecy. One could say "Fancy a jawn, bro?" and the other would know that "jawn" meant "corn dog."