The New Fowler's Modern English Usage, Revised Edition

427 jarl I jeu d'esprit
CMHTs that greater expression should
be able to be given to the philosophy of
equal opportunities in that by focusing
on a given area with the benefit of a
multi skill group together with users of
the service a very clear strategy can be
drawn up within the operation policy of
each team that will lead not to a bland
overall response to need but one that is
tailored to and by the individual and
community. In recruitment, selection
and retention of staff, statutory and voluntary
organisations need to continue
to address the issue of achieving a shared
understanding of what equal opportunities
actually means and how it is to
be put into practice." Insofar as this
passage means anything—beyond its
menacingly imperative tone—it means
that you can't expect blacks to be the
equal of whites, so they must be given
jobs which, strictly speaking, they don't
really deserve.' One's heart goes out to
Theodore Dalrymple and other hapless
recipients of such bureaucratic opacity.
jarl. Pronounce /ja:l/, with the initial
sound of yew.
jasmine. The three-syllabled by-form
jessamine /'dsesamm/ was common in literary
use in the 19c. (and earlier): Ana
the jessamine faint, and the sweet tuberose—
Shelley, 1820; All night has the casement
jessamine stirr'd—Tennyson, 1855. But jasmine
(first recorded in Lyte, 1578) continues
to be the normal term in botanical
parlance.
jaundice, jaunt, jaunty. The îgc.-early
20c. variant pronunciation of the stem
vowel as /a:/ seems to have been given
up by standard speakers at some point
in the first half of the 20c. The only
current pronunciations are /'d3o:ndis/,
/d3o:nt/, and /'d3o:nti/. Cf. LAUNCH.
jazz. See-z-, -zz-.
jehad. See JIHAD.
jejune. 1 Now usu. pronounced /d3i-
'd5u:n/, with short first vowel, and
stressed on the second syllable. Fowler
(1926) commented 'now je jOon [i.e. /'d3i:-
d3u:n/] by recessive accent', but his view
has been overtaken by events.
2 Derived from L jëjûnus 'fasting', the
word first (17-18c.) meant 'without food'
in English; then, in transferred use, '(of
concrete things, land, water, food, etc.)
thin, meagre, unsatisfying'; and, more
or less simultaneously, 'unsatisfying to
the mind, dull, insipid, etc.: said of
thought, feeling, action, etc., and esp. of
speech or writing' (OED). Towards the end
of the 19c, by a somewhat surprising
association of ideas, jejune acquired the
sense 'puerile, childish, naïve' as if it
were connected with L juvenis 'a young
person' or Fr. jeune 'young', or so some
authorities say.
The OED lists examples of the new
use from 1898 onward, including the
following: Is anybody ... now so jejune as
not to realise that the state ownership of the
deadweight of present nationalised industries
must prevent Labour governments from being
able to follow... their social policies?—Economist,
1975; Mother seemed jejune, at times,
with her enthusiasms and her sense of mission-M.
Howard, 1982. WDEU cites
further examples of the new use from
H. L. Mencken (1920) and from various
journalistic sources. On the other hand,
in a well-known essay in The State of the
Language (1980), Kingsley Amis, railed
against the use ('my favourite solecism
of all time'). It seems unlikely that Fr.
jeune or L juvenis had anything to do
with the matter. A semantic shift from
'unsatisfying, insipid' to 'puerile' is not
intrinsically improbable in a word that
is in any case rather rare. Nevertheless,
I do not feel comfortable with the new
sense myself, and there are numerous
synonyms of puerile (childish, infantile, juvenile,
etc.) that can be used instead. In
the circumstances, those who wish to
use the word at all are advised to use it
in its traditional senses, at least for the
present.
jerrymander. See GERRYMANDER.
jessamine. See JASMINE.
jetsam. See FLOTSAM AND JETSAM.
jettison. In maritime law (since the
15c.) it means 'the action of throwing
goods overboard, esp. in order to lighten
a ship in distress'. Since the 19c. it (and
also the corresponding verb) has been
used of the action of throwing out or
discarding any unwanted object (or idea,
etc.).
jeu d'esprit. PI. jeux d'esprit, with the x
left silent. See -x.