I moved to
For months, I heard the word as join’ or jon’. I assumed it was an abbreviation of joint, which we’ve all heard or used to function similarly as a kind of all-purpose pronoun (“that's my joint” or “that's the joint”). It wasn’t until about the billionth time this summer that I heard the word that I was forced to ask someone point blank what the fuck was going on. By the end of the summer, I was working at an inner-city school, and I began hearing it literally three and four times in a single sentence. Hell, three or four times in a sentence fragment.
So, I started to ask my roommate, “Have you heard anyone use this word--” I was cut off, “You mean, ‘jawn?’” Apparently, everybody knew but me. My roommate, who hears the word in her office apparently as much as I do at school, explained that it wasn’t a slurred version of joint but a unique word spelled j-a-w-n that rhymes with prawn or yawn. I didn’t believe her. I understand appropriating existing words (skeet, to use my favorite example of the last five years), but you can’t just invent words, right? I held onto my jon’ theory until the next day when, with a little time left in the hour, I put it to my fifth period class.
“Guys, I have a white question.”
“What is jon’?”
Uproarious laughter.
My spelling and pronunciation were corrected, and the already obviously versatile word was defined for me as, “Anything.”
We went back to the apartment to consult Urban Dictionary, and it had this to say:
As a noun:
Bob: Holler
George: Lemme get that jawns
As a verb (and a noun)
History teacher: Hello kids
Kid: If we jawns that jawns can we jawn it?
As an adverb:
Ferdinand: It was done in an extremely jawn fashion.
As an exclamation:
Kid: OMG I JUST FOUND A DOLLAR
Kid: OHHHHH NICE JAWNS!!!!!!
This omni-functionality of jawn raises an interesting question: Could language devolve into nothing but a series of jawnses?
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