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The enduring mystery of ‘Jawn,’ Philadelphia’s all-purpose noun (2016)
- cammil 4y agoIsn't "thing" another word that is like "jawn"?
- sosborn 4y agoHawaii equivalent is "da kine"
- jasonlotito 4y agoAll my jawn using friends here are going to love this. I live outside Philly, and yes, they use jawn.
- tomcam 4y agoThe Philly accent is maybe my least favorite in the USA, but jawn definitely needs wider circulation.
- maxcan 4y agoPhiladelphia born and raised and for my life I couldn't define what 'jawn' means.
- SpikeDad 4y agoSame although haven't been there for many years and still I never heard lawn once from my parents, my relatives or myself. Is there a more localized area of Philly that uses it - my family covers south and west Philly.
- jonnycat 4y agoSame here, I only learned about it as an adult.
- maxcan 4y agoglad its not just me
- tomrod 4y ago> According to experts, it’s unlike any word, in any language. I introduce you to "kwan" (or "kuan") from Visayan, which serves the same purpose. https://www.reddit.com/r/DoesNotTranslate/comments/jmkvbd/filipino_visayan_kuan_is_our_way_of_saying_ummm/ https://www.reddit.com/r/DoesNotTranslate/comments/jmkvbd/fi... Kwan is not just a time-filler word like "um." You can legit use it in a sentence as an object-filler word and people still understand. "I was surfing at the kwan and ate some kwan with hot sauce." "Was it good?" "Oh yeah!"
- eunoia 4y agoSounds very similar to usage of “da kine” in Hawaiian Creole English (i.e Hawaiian pidgin).
- tomcam 4y agoThat struck me immediately too.
- tomcam 4y agoFrom your reference it can also be used as a verb, which is dope. I kind of think that there must be a vast amount of Filipino culture I don't know about. Big population, but little penetration of the culture in mainland USA.
- tomrod 4y agoFilipino culture rocks. The food, the festivities, the languages, the zest for life. Absolutely loved getting the chance to participate in it here and there. I miss speaking to native speakers. The distinction of verbs and nouns in Austronesian languages generally are pretty lax. Also cool, Tongan and Samoan speakers found Visayan numbering mutually distinguishable -- "lima" for 5, for example.
- anon_123g987 4y agoEnglish has "verbing", too. > "[E]asy conversion of nouns to verbs has been part of English grammar for centuries; it is one of the processes that make English English." https://www.thoughtco.com/verbing-definition-1692587 https://www.thoughtco.com/verbing-definition-1692587 Just like "jawn" is not unique (not even within English), in my experience there's almost nothing really unique in any language.
- redweer 4y agothere's a skateboard mag out of Philly called Skate Jawn https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skate_Jawn https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skate_Jawn
- tomcam 4y agoWholly appropriate
- foolfoolz 4y agoshit is a synonym for jawn
- Larrikin 4y agoShit is almost never a synonym for a woman
- verrp 4y ago"I don't know shit about fuck."
- CollinEMac 4y agoI was thinking the same thing. Seems to function pretty much the same way.
- alistairSH 4y agoPretty much. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=igh9iO5BxBo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=igh9iO5BxBo
- lelandfe 4y agoFor some reason, "shit" reads as a plural noun to me while "jawn" reads singular. I've never really thought about it, hah. E.g. "can you grab the shit from my truck" vs "can you grab the jawn"
- tomcam 4y agoSort of like sheep? Except what about the context "get out of here, you little shits"? Edit: a_mechanic got here first: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32872443 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32872443
- pc86 4y agoI would've expected "that jawn" but couldn't for the life of me tell you why.
- robocat 4y ago
- SllX 4y agoApparently Philadelphian culture is more contextual than literal. You just say what’s in your jawn and people understand.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- thebiglebrewski 4y agoI'm upvoting this jawn!
- dec0dedab0de 4y agoI grew up 10 minutes from Philadelphia, and I distinctively remember kids I know starting to say jawn in the mid 90s. I was like wait are you saying joint, as in a spike lee joint? and they were like no it's jawn. Around the same time everyone changed the emphasized word in the phrase "yeah it is" when in agreement. More recently it reminds me how people switched to "all the sudden" all of a sudden.
- gxqoz 4y agoYeah I feel everyone around me who used this word added a bit of a "t" sound to the end. It wasn't until I was an adult I saw it spelled out like "jawn".
- xg15 4y ago> More recently it reminds me how people switched to "all the sudden" all of a sudden. ...and as a non-native english speaker, I just learned that "all of a sudden" is slang and not just a normal part of the language. Wow!
- danbolt 4y agoJawn is useful for readability, but also provides an easy performance benefit too. Iterators for `std::unordered_map` will have the proper `const` values and the compiler won’t need to do any implicit conversions.
- HideousKojima 4y agoHello GPT3 (or attempt at mocking GPT3 accusations?)
- tux3 4y agoTrying to demonstrate that you can't replace literally any word with it? 'const' is more a qualifier or an adjective than an object/thing. You wouldn't s/fast/jawn/ in the sentence "a fast car", like you can't replace const in "a const iterator"
- jawns 4y agoI've been using variations of "jawn" or "jawns" as my username for 20+ years. It's a word that has endured surprisingly well, as slang goes. And it's a conspicuously egalitarian term. You'll find it used in both blue-collar and white-collar settings, and across racial lines. There's very little tribal attachment. Nobody cares if you appropriate it. The general sentiment is the more jawn users, the better. But unfortunately, I'm afraid it may have jumped the shark when the "Jawn Morgan" billboards started appearing: https://billypenn.com/2022/05/25/jawn-morgan-billboards-philadelphia-personal-injury-lawyer-ads/ https://billypenn.com/2022/05/25/jawn-morgan-billboards-phil...
- spyspy 4y agoard
- tomcam 4y agoThought that was a typo! But no: https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=ard https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=ard
- phlalexsh 4y agoehhhh I disagree. I definitely cringe when I hear a hipster who's lived here for 2 years try to inject jawn into every conversation. Feels very forced. Also Jawn being put on pins and shirts is also very cringe to me
- lc9er 4y agoYeah. I feel like there's two types of people that actually use jawn: those that are very Philly and those that are trying, really, really hard to sound Philly. I can't say I've said jawn with a straight face since I was a little kid.
- gerdesj 4y ago"I definitely cringe" and "Also ... is also ... very cringe to me" You certainly get plenty of mileage out of the word cringe. Is it a verb, is it an adjective - who knows? Your also ... also construct riffs on "either ... or", "both ... and" and the like. There must be a name for terms like that - you get them in Latin too so they've been around for a while eg nec ... necque (neither ... nor). Jawn is just a colloquialism but I've seen also ... also several times before now. I've also seen very cringe too. I am not taking the piss but I feel that I am watching language evolve right in front of me. I suspect that whilst this article and set of threads gets itself all whizzed up over jawn, it is missing the rather bigger point about language and conversations that travel at the speed of light instead of just sound and is distributed by the internet and not just the post office. On HN we pontificators have an audience that a Roman Imperator could only dream of.
- maxpowersage 4y agoWentz and Foles at Minnesota. Tom Brady rests.
- tillinghast 4y agoDarmok and Jalad at Tanagra. Shaka, when the walls fell.
- maxpowersage 4y agoTom Brady, his hands empty.
- maxpowersage 4y agoEagles fans when the ball fell.
- dang 4y agoRelated: The Enduring Mystery of ‘Jawn,’ Philadelphia’s All-Purpose Noun (2016) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20574296 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20574296 - July 2019 (108 comments) The Enduring Mystery of 'Jawn', Philadelphia's All-Purpose Noun - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11367406 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11367406 - March 2016 (52 comments)
- shashanoid 4y agoAyo i'm from philly this made me chuckle
- Gordonjcp 4y agoSounds a bit like "yoke" in Irish English.
- smm11 4y agoOpe.
- bwestergard 4y agoIn D.C. and Baltimore it's more like "jont".
- spyspy 4y agoWait til people find out about ard
- novacole 4y agoAs a Philadelphian, i can sum up the usage of jawn as: a place, a thing or a girl/woman. For example this is a valid sentence: “Person 1: I was at the jawn down the street when that bad jawn from up the block walked in. But she didn’t say anything. Person 2: oh that’s a bad jawn” Translation: “Person 1: I was at the place down the street when that pretty woman from up the block walked in. But she didn’t say anything. Person 2: oh that sucks”
- appleflaxen 4y agoIs "whatever" a similar word in any way? "“Person 1: I was at the whatever down the street when that bad whatever from up the block walked in. But she didn’t say anything. Person 2: oh that’s a bad whatever” ?
- novacole 4y agoI don’t think so. When I read that I don’t substitute the proper words in my head as I would with jawn. Also, “whatever” sounds negative to my ear, whereas jawn would be taken neutrally.
- tzs 4y agoI wonder if this gave South Park the idea for "marklar" [1]? [1] https://southpark.cc.com/clips/151539/welcome-to-marklar https://southpark.cc.com/clips/151539/welcome-to-marklar
- a1ku 4y agoThere's a similar word in southern Italy, "cazzafà" or "fattappost", which can mean basically anything you don't know or remember the exact word for.
- hubrix 4y agoI think whatever "linguists" did this "research" must be undergraduate internet searchers. For example in Russian the words "fignya/fignyushka" or the less polite "huynya/huynyushka" are used in a very similar way. They are a noun representing an abstract "thing" that the listener would understand from context.
- Larrikin 4y agoAs a transplant to Philly for college from VA, Philadelphia definitely sits in a weird area when it comes to their cultural contributions. New York does their best to make sure people from Philly know they aren't allowed to be culturally relevant like they do with New Jersey so there's a little bit of mixing of culture from Philly to NJ. It has Baltimore to bully in a similar way as NYC does but evidence of the culture is obvious. Jersey club as a music genre is wholly from Baltimore but obviously influenced from Philadelphia. But its influence seems to be completely stopped at DC, where people from Philly "who made it" but not in NYC try to show they aren't from Philly. I lived there through college, and never felt any influence to pick up the slang since it seemed to just exist in a bubble that was ridiculed from all sides. I would say I wanted a hoagie at the store, because they would pretend they didn't know what a sub was, but thats about it. But jawn seems like the most boring word that online articles like to talk about. Its obviously prevalent but its also not unknown and actually fairly common. When I was in Philly earlier this year a lawyer's ad on the radio used it prevalently to try and show some kind of connection to the city. Its kind of unique but uninteresting, similar to a broccoli rabe sandwich bloggers rave about since the best cheesesteaks in the city have basically been established for decades now. Now an article explaining 'actin jo (joe??)' I'd love to read about because I've never gotten a straight answer on that, but have seen fights get started because one girl said it to another.
- x-shadowban 4y ago...and then there was a perf regression cause the jawns were being autoboxed to Jawns...
- cryptonector 4y ago> 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. Uh, "smurf" is like that too.
- acchow 4y agoIn California, we use "dude" "Dude can be anything. Males are dude. Females are dude. My phone is dude. That cat over there, it is dude. The green light that only lasts long enough for 1 car to pass is dude. I have called my hair "dude". I have called my coffee maker "dude". The entire population of the world, and all of their belongings, are all dude." - Some post on Reddit
- m1gu3l 4y ago“i just saw a dude in the women’s bathroom” is typically going to be interpreted in a way that doesn’t really match up with this take.
- pxeger1 4y agoIs "dude" quite as flexible, though? It seems to me like its generic use is only valid when you're actually just personifying an object. For example, with my phone I might say: > Come on dude, why are you so slow > My old dude lasted me 6 years > I love this dude But I wouldn't say any of these things: > I lost my dude earlier, can you call it? > I spent $600 on this dude > Don't you have your dude on you? I'm a Brit, reflecting on the American dialect I've picked up, so I very much could be wrong. I'd be intrigued to know if you really do use "dude" like that.
- tux3 4y ago> I spent $600 on this dude This one sounds alright, to my ESL ears. The rule it seems to me is you have to be pointing at the thing or making a clear reference to it. This dude right here is okay, some dude you own, while talking about some offscreen object, much weirder.
- darkerside 4y ago> I lost my dude earlier, can you call it? Yes to this one. It's gotta be clear from context.
- acchow 4y agoThese all seem fine to me in northern California. Might raise some eyebrows in some other parts of the country.
- permo-w 4y agowhat about “thing”? I’m highly sceptical that there are no other equivalent or even similar words in other languages