It has nothing to do with jQuery, or anything else. (function() {})(); is a pretty standard Javascript pattern to execute an anonymous function immediately at e

It has nothing to do with jQuery, or anything else. (function() {})(); is a pretty standard Javascript pattern to execute an anonymous function immediately at evaluation. Because javascript has lexical scoping at the function, your use of "use strict"; and any var-prepended variables won't be hoisted up the prototype chain, potentially becoming globals. The ability to pass in a global as a local variable is simply a convenience. The global is available inside the closure anyways. It's a global after all. My point was, the battle over the dollar sign single character variable name is stupid.