When ‘the whole jawn came down,’ we went looking for the word’s Philly roots

The Daily News’ Bill Bender got the perfect quote from a witness to a building collapse in Strawberry Mansion earlier this month.

“The whole jawn came down,” Pele Lewis told Bender, thus giving us a phrase that will now live forever. 

Given that, we thought this was the perfect time to ask Ben Zimmer, linguist, lexicographer, Wall Street Journal columnist and former New York Times “On Language” columnist, to shed some light on the origins of “jawn,” that ubiquitous, all-purpose word from Philly’s regional lexicon.

First, we asked him to define the word itself. 

“So, I’m not a native — I’m from central New Jersey, so not part of the Greater Philly area,” he says. “But my sense of it is that it comes up from the way that ‘joint’ was used in New York slang (particularly hip-hop slang), to refer to something in a positive way — like, ‘That’s the Joint,’ the song by Funky Four Plus One from 1981.

“But [jawn] got extended in different directions semantically; it could refer to not just something you admire or think of in a positive way, but as an all-purpose word to refer to different types of things and people.”

Asked how he traces the history of something as ephemeral as the spoken language, Zimmer said, “It’s tricky. You try to first rely on what other people might have done; I looked at various slang dictionaries, but they really weren’t helpful because it’s pretty much a local thing, as opposed to ‘joint.’ It seems to represent a pronunciation of the word, but also a local meaning of the word, which can be harder to find.

“Fortunately, there are online resources. There are old Usenet newsgroups for rap and hip-hop fans, and they can go all the way back to the early ’90s when people might be using these terms and talking about how they are specific to Philly.  ‘Jawn’ was something that came up in the newsgroups and was discussed; I think it also entered this online rap dictionary that originally circulated on the Usenet, but now has its own website, rapdict.org. But from that period, it was identified as Philly slang.

“You really need people with local knowledge. My knowledge of old-school Philly rap is pretty limited, so I’m sure I don’t know the best places to look for how that expression might have spread — if there were particular songs on local record labels that might have helped spread it.

“It came up on the American Dialect Society mailing list, actually; someone was asking about it quite a while ago, and that’s just the sort of thing they like to try and figure out. There was a suggestion that it could have also been some sort of variation on ‘John’ — the name — but people mostly talked about it as coming from ‘joint,’ which seems like the most obvious etymology to me. ‘Joint,’ meaning marijuana cigarette, gets extended into referring to anything that’s fine or pleasurable, as in, ‘That’s the ______.’ But it’s difficult in something like that where there aren’t a lot of good sources, so there’s a lot of speculation.”