The Forgotten Former Meaning of “Jerk”
The curious pop culture etymology of “jerk,” from 1979’s ‘The Jerk’ through today. (Or, “When did jerk stop meaning ‘stupid’?”)
In the most famous scene from The Jerk, Steve Martin’s Navin Johnson, who’s about to be back in rags after briefly rolling in riches, slowly mopes out of his mansion. “I don’t need any of this stuff!” he shouts, surveying his scattered possessions. But as he shuffles toward the door, bric-a-brac keeps ending up in his arms: an ashtray, a paddleball toy, a remote control, a matchbook, a lamp, a magazine. “Well, what are you looking at?” Navin yells at his heartbroken wife, Marie (Bernadette Peters), as he prepares to pick up one more memento, a chair. “What do you think I am, some kind of jerk or something?”
If someone watching the 1979 film for the first time in 2023 were to answer that rhetorical question, they might say, “No, not really.” In that scene, sort of. In other scenes, nah. Navin is oblivious, not obnoxious. He’s ignorant, not intolerant. He’s naive, not intentionally cruel. He’s a bumpkin, a rube, and a moron, maybe, but a jerk? For the most part, no, I wouldn’t say so. There are many reasons no one would remake The Jerk the same way today, but if one were to retell a similar story, it would need a different name. Navin was a 5-seed in The Ringer’s bracket of best pop culture jerks, as he had to be: He’s the titular character in a well-known movie called The Jerk! But it didn’t feel like an upset when he made an early exit—undoubtedly holding his chair—against 12-seed J. Jonah Jameson. Now, that guy’s a jerk.
There’s nothing quite like a character you love to hate. Ladies and gentlemen, it’s Jerks Week at The Ringer. Vote for your favorite ones in the Best Pop Culture Jerks Bracket, and check back throughout the week for a selection of stories on one of the most underrated archetypes.
On Monday, my colleague Andrew Gruttadaro pinpointed the placement of “jerk” on the asshole hierarchy. A jerk, he concluded, ranks somewhere between a brat and a dirtbag. Readers could and did quibble with whether a jerk is more or less asshole-ish than that and whether certain members of the bracket fit the bill. However, what wasn’t in dispute is that jerks are somewhere on the spectrum of “bad and annoying people”—not just slow-witted ones. Navin would never have qualified if not for a fortuitous title—to modern minds, a far from fitting one.
In 1979, though, the title didn’t seem like such a misnomer. In the 40-plus years since The Jerk came out, the noun’s meaning has evolved (or devolved, if we’re going by behavior). We can track that change via plot synopses. Here’s how IMDb describes The Jerk: “A simpleminded, sheltered country boy suddenly decides to leave his family home to experience life in the big city, where his naivete is both his best friend and his worst enemy.”
Compare that to the logline of the less memorable movie The Jerk Theory, which came out 30 years later: “An aspiring recording artist, Adam, is burned by a bad relationship experience and decides that if women won’t respond to the ‘nice guy’ then he’ll be ‘the jerk.’”
Or the TV series Jerk, which came out 10 years after that: “Tim has cerebral palsy, which means that people judge him, and his crumpled tissue of a body. But usually they judge him wrongly. Because what they don’t realize is that inside that severely disabled, fragile body is a bit of an asshole.”
Navin: nice, naive guy. Adam and Tim: not nice. Somewhere along the line, “jerk” stopped referring to boobs and dolts and took on a harder edge. The jerk store called, and they ran out of Navins.
“There’s definitely been a semantic shift in ‘jerk’ over the years,” says linguist, lexicographer, and Wall Street Journal language columnist Ben Zimmer. The Oxford English Dictionary, which dates “jerk,” an American colloquialism, back to 1935, reports: “Originally: an inept or pathetic person; a fool. Now: an objectionable or obnoxious person.” Green’s Dictionary of Slang, which traces “jerk” back to 1934, defines its original meaning as “a fool, an idiot, a failure.”
The OED’s first reference derives from Albin J. Pollock’s The Underworld Speaks, a 1935 book that “contains expressions gathered from convicts and ex-convicts—from murderers to embezzlers, dope-fiends, narcotic traffickers, racketeers, politicians, bosses, bootleggers, law enforcement officers, 100% coppers, as well as from other classes of men and women who possess worldly experience.” Those conduits to the seamy side of society, it seems, informed Pollock that a “jerk”—which, as a close cousin to jerk-off, probably began its pejorative journey as a reference to masturbation—was “a boob; chump; a sucker.”
“That was the prevailing sense for decades and lived on in Steve Martin’s The Jerk,” Zimmer says. In Born Standing Up, Martin’s 2007 autobiography, he recounts how The Jerk got its name: “We were still mulling over titles for the movie. One day I said to [director Carl Reiner], ‘It needs to be something short, yet have the feeling of an epic tale. Like Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot, but not that. Like The Jerk.’ The title, after a few more days of analyzing, stuck.” At a time when “idiot” and “jerk” were widely considered synonyms, The Jerk was a natural choice.
However, the future, more dominant meaning made cameos almost from the start, as evidenced by a Random House Historical Dictionary of American Slang entry that conflates the two: “A contemptible fool, dolt. An offensive or worthless person.” According to Zimmer, “You can see the ‘low-grade asshole’ meaning percolating along the way. … Some other examples I’ve seen starting in the 1950s seem like they lean toward an asshole-ish interpretation, and that meaning takes over in the ’80s or so.”
In other words, right after The Jerk. In fact, “the 1970s is when you start to see the obnoxious meaning really take off,” says Michael Adams, an English professor and specialist in lexicography at Indiana University Bloomington and the author of Slang: The People’s Poetry and other books about language. Not only was there “a rising use of ‘jerk,’” but there was also “the absolutely predictable development” of “compound forms like jerk ass, jerk face, jerk wad, jerk weed. … That is another reflection of the obnoxious meaning, and basically a generation of heavy slang users looking for a way not to sound like they come from the 1930s by using jerk in the traditional way of their parents and grandparents.” Martin, Adams notes, was in his mid-30s when The Jerk came out, old enough that in contrast to the kids on the cutting edge of jerk usage, he would have been “referring to an older use of the word.”
The Ringer’s Streaming Guide
There’s a lot of TV out there. We want to help: Every week, we’ll tell you the best and most urgent shows to stream so you can stay on top of the ever-expanding heap of Peak TV.
It’s fairly easy to find references to jerk’s now-outmoded meaning that predate The Jerk. Take, for example, a 1972 episode of The Brady Bunch in which Marcia embarrasses herself and her older brother on her first day in high school. “She acted like a jerk, that’s what happened,” Greg complains to their father, continuing, “She made a jerk out of me.”
After The Jerk, though, those usages were fewer and farther between. 1982’s Fast Times at Ridgemont High contained two old-school uses of “jerk,” and a 1987 Cheers episode features good-natured sad sack Cliff Clavin (rhymes with Navin) saying, “I don’t know how you guys did it, but you made me out as, uh, some kind of a jerk,” as he bungles stowing a projection screen. Beyond that, the uses gravitate toward the more modern meaning, though the two interpretations overlapped for a while. Home Alone (1990) seems to use it both ways. In Goodfellas, from the same year, Paulie tells Henry, “Don’t make a jerk out of me”—a line that originally read, “Don’t make me a fool.” But Goodfellas depicted a conversation from decades earlier; in contemporary exchanges, “jerk” and “asshole” converged. By the mid-’90s, the now-familiar use was cemented: See, for instance, Tom Cruise as Jerry Maguire in 1996, berating himself for losing a top draft pick “because a hockey player’s kid made me feel like a superficial jerk.”
The use of “stupid jerk,” once almost redundant, persisted for some time. But the use of “jerk” alone to identify a dunderhead sounds anachronistic, if not nonsensical, now to anyone who added “jerk” to their vocabulary after the “dunce” definition fell out of fashion. I first became aware of the generational jerk shift years ago when my mom—who’s not too far from Martin’s age—used it in the Navin sense. As someone who came of age early in the heyday of jerk’s pivot to “prick,” this shook me to the core. Did I not know what “jerk” meant? How long had I hurled the wrong insult at assholes and dicks?
Here’s the sort of spooky thing. It’s not just that there are multiple generations who’ve never known a “jerk” was once a simpleton or sap. It’s that some of the folks who used to use it that way don’t remember that they did. When I asked my mom to define the word this week, she used the modern meaning, with no apparent recollection of her former firm conviction that a jerk was a dope, dodo, or dimwit. Did someone Neuralyze my mom, or have I become a jerk truther?
My mom isn’t the only boomer who may have revised their history of this specific subject. You can trace the ascendance of the asshole strain of jerk through the writing of Pulitzer Prize–winning columnist and humorist Dave Barry, who’s between my mom and Martin in age. In Stay Fit and Healthy Until You’re Dead (1985), Barry wrote, “How many bones do you think your skeletal system has? Would you say 50? 150? 250? 300? More than 300? If you guessed 50, you’re a real jerk.” In Dave Barry Turns 40 (1990), he wrote, “So your financial situation is a mess. Okay, fine. The important thing is—don’t be discouraged. There’s no reason to get down on yourself, just because you’ve been an unbelievable jerk.” But by 1996—the year of “Show me the money”—he was using the modern meaning in a column headlined, “What It Takes to Be a Jerk.”
When I brought this to Barry’s attention and asked him how the great redefinition of jerk may have happened, he wrote, “I always thought jerk meant asshole. At least I thought I always thought that, although the quotes you cite seem to suggest otherwise. So to answer your question: I have no idea. You may be right!”
If not for Navin, I might question whether I’d discovered a new case of the Mandela effect, or invented a vast “jerk” conspiracy. But no: There’s the jerk in The Jerk, acting quite un-jerk-like and, in the process, reassuring me that the semantic drift of “jerk” is just part of the great glacial motion that reshapes the lexical landscape.
Why jerk took this trajectory is tougher to determine. Maybe the new jerk serves a more important purpose as a stand-in for asshole; we still have “ass,” without the “hole,” to indicate an imbecile or blockhead. “Of all the ‘asshole’ substitutes,” Geoffrey Nunberg wrote in his 2012 book, Ascent of the A-Word, “jerk comes closest. It’s the world usually chosen by people who want to convey the meaning of asshole without actually using the word.” It is handy to have a word we can use to put someone down without, as Nunberg says, “the same brazen effrontery.”
Zimmer isn’t so sure. “It does help to have a less obscene alternative to ‘asshole,’ as Nunberg suggests,” he says. “But it’s hard to say exactly why terms shift semantically like this—it’s not simply a matter of ‘usefulness.’” Adams speculates that jerk just sounds better this way. “It’s kind of a harsh word. So it’s said with harsh feeling and it reflects that harsh feeling. And so it may match up with the obnoxious-person meaning a little bit better than it does the foolish-person meaning.” Plus, he says, the progression of jerk’s meaning “makes a natural sense to me, because let’s face it, some idiots are obnoxious and some people are obnoxious because they’re idiots.”
A little light searching suggests I’m not the only amateur etymologist to lose their lexical bearings over the near-forgotten former meaning of “jerk.” “When did jerk stop meaning stupid?” a Redditor asked in 2021 (ironically, on the NoStupidQuestions subreddit). Others have seemed similarly unnerved by how the word went from signifying one thing to signifying something else so suddenly, within living memory, as everyone who used to use it the old way overwrote the old definition. There’s a sense of suddenly standing on shaky ground: Am I fluent in this language, or have I Englished wrong all along? How can we communicate if “jerk” meant nitwit in 1982 but not in 1996?
To linguists, though, the tendency for language to rewrite itself is just the way of the word. “That stuff happens all the time,” Adams says. “It’s the malleability of the language to express new meanings. … We could look up almost any word like jerk and find that it’s gone through some transformation of meaning.” It’s best to embrace the inevitable; language is a living document, and we’re all lifelong learners.
Some things do stay the same: Jerk “can be used as a term of endearment in a way that ‘asshole’ can’t,” Zimmer says. Nunberg, in his book, and Zimmer, via email, cite the 1941 Howard Hawks film Ball of Fire, in which Barbara Stanwyck (playing showgirl Sugarpuss O’Shea) says about Gary Cooper’s character—a slang lexicographer!—“I love him because he doesn’t know how to kiss, the jerk.” “Sugarpuss isn’t calling Potts an asshole, of course, just an obtuse, hapless fellow,” Zimmer says. “The ‘asshole’ reading would have been anachronistic for 1941.”
Navin’s no better at kissing in ’79: As Marie awaits their first lip-lock, he licks the side of her face instead.
That affectionate “jerk” from the ’40s isn’t so different from Sarah saying, “I did it because I’m in love with you, you jerk!” to Bailey on Party of Five, or Carla saying, “You big jerk!” after angry sex with Turk on Scrubs, or Leslie lovingly (and repeatedly) calling Ron a jerk on the last season of Parks and Recreation. “‘Jerk’ can still be used endearingly,” Zimmer says, adding, “The old sense of foolishness lingers, allowing ‘jerk’ to be used for someone lovably slow on the uptake. I’d say ‘jerk’ hasn’t simply moved from one pejorative extreme to the other, but remains flexible in its meaning.” There may still be a bit of The Jerk left in “jerk” after all.
