• Position is where you are at any moment. If you're not moving, your position doesn't change.
• Velocity is how quickly your position changes. If you are doing 30 MPH on a perfectly straight road with no stops and starts, you may not even notice you're moving until you look out the window.
• Acceleration is how quickly your velocity changes. It's the force that makes you feel like you are being pushed back into your seat, for example when your velocity increases from 30 MPH to 60 MPH.
• Jerk is how quickly the acceleration changes. It's the force that makes your head snap back against the headrest. A good driver will change acceleration slowly to reduce this effect. If there is too much jerk, it may mean that your driver is being a jerk.
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth,_fifth,_and_sixth_deriv...
Obviously, someone on the intertubes was being a jerk about jounce!
You are a 3rd derivative of position!
I suppose if "soda jerk" was thought to be a menial job (reminded of one of the threads in the film, "The Best Years of Our Lives" (1946)) ... then the original meaning of "jerk" as a loser might have come from that.
So he taught us how to calculate it and its importance, because it turns out the car can handle a lot more jerk than the humans inside!
Either way, I loved the joke. Thank you!
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskUK/comments/17tzcl5/comment/k915... says
> I certainly use it as a goodbye - typically after meeting someone in the street and stopping to chat, but also generally. Also as an informal signoff for email and saying goodbye over telephone.
>
> 64M British, brought up in London.
Now, I'm having second thoughts. Would I say it to a baker after buying a pastry? Yes. If I ran into a friend while out on a trip would I say it? No, I don't think so, but do I? Maybe as in "good seeing you"? How confusing.
Person seeing me walk out the door: "Cheers! See you tomorrow!".
you're suggesting a family member might say this as you were leaving?
Possibly also because of the phonetic similarity with "ciao"?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eggcorn
> An eggcorn is the alteration of a word or phrase through the mishearing or reinterpretation of one or more of its elements, creating a new phrase which is plausible when used in the same context. Thus, an eggcorn is an unexpectedly fitting or creative malapropism. Eggcorns often arise as people attempt to make sense of a stock phrase that uses a term unfamiliar to them, as for example replacing "Alzheimer's disease" with "old-timers' disease", or William Shakespeare's "to the manner born" with "to the manor born". The autological word "eggcorn" is itself an eggcorn, derived from acorn.
From Norman French, "face, merry faces, festivity"; from Late Latin, "head".
The sense of smiling, merry expression, good cheer, cheerful, is well attested in literature. "Cheers" is a versatile modern expression. I have heard it as "thanks", "drink well" (of course), and yes even "see you later".
this being my point. how do you know that what you were hearing wasn't someone saying thanks as they were leaving?
If someone said ‘cheers’ to me when parting, I’d interpret it the same way as if they’d said ‘thanks’ — which could be slightly strange, depending on the situation.
Maybe it is a conflation of cheers (smiles, thanks) and cheerio (old-fashioned familiar good-bye).
"I nam not nyce." = "Don't take me for a simpleton."
> “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!”
Clown can mean jerk in either sense. “Who’s this idiot?” means something closer to asshole. In old movies you’ll hear someone called “a selfish fool” or “inconsiderate fool,” where fool means something closer to asshole than fool as we usually use it.
Maybe the underlying issue is that it’s hard to tell someone acting obnoxiously because they don’t know better from someone deliberately indifferent or malicious, and the consequences are often the same.
This is a great hard and fast rule of thumb for photocopiers as well!
> Why not?
M. Emmett Walsh, Carl Reiner, Maurice Evans and Jackie Mason are all dead, for one reason.
> The Jerk (1979) "For Theater Owners Only" Trailer
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8GZMbj8dt1o
It’s hard to be this bad intentionally, and it somehow wraps around to being good again, and that’s knowing it’s an ad and the premise is suspect. Steve Martin is that good.
It raises an interesting point that I’ll put to the projectionists of HN:
Were there really trailers intended for the theater owners only? It seems absurd on its face, but I’m willing to believe that it’s been tried before, and definitely has since. I mean, ad targeting already exists, but it was probably a bit harder to do back in the day.
That’s enough for this content hole.
OTOH it was a moderately-budgeted, somewhat clever comedy, those have trouble getting made today.
My Cousin Vinnie is an example that holds up still. No current events, no racist jokes, just typical social interactions that are still relevant.
It's also in how you watch things. I sometimes catch old films in the theatre and the room is filled with laughter. I was belly laughing to The Palm Beach Story (Sturges, 1942). Heck, I've been to see Shakespeare where everyone's laughing.
Steve Martin's comedy in general isn't funny anymore for me. I listened to his 70s albums which I found hilarious when I was a kid. Nothing about them is funny anymore. The jokes themselves aren't funny. It's only the delivery that made them funny and that style of delivery doesn't work anymore. He's been in some great movies, some of which are comedies and still funny but his own stand up comedy isn't anymore, at least for me.
I am gen-X and I have no recollection of that former meaning at all. I was 10 or 11 years old when the movie The Jerk came out, and I recall being mildly confused about the fact that he didn't really seem like a jerk, and sort of thinking that he must be acting that way on purpose.
Well, happens to us all eventually, haha.
https://thehabit.co/nimrod-hectoring-maudlin-eponymns-and-pe...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nimrod_(disambiguation)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nimrud_(disambiguation)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nimrud
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borsippa
Either way, Bugs Bunny used it sarcastically to describe Elmer Fudd, and here we are.
But making poor decisions and offending god is not particularly noteworthy for a figure in genesis. Possibly the most interesting thing about genesis as a piece of literature is that making horrible god-offending choices is quite routine and the figures are not understood as less important because of it, nor more important in spite of it, but simply important for unrelated reasons that cannot be changed by the quality of their judgement or morality of their actions.
I have also seen the argument that our contemporary distinction between moral and intellectual wisdom itself is something we as readers unconsciously impose on the text, with the distinction not prominently drawn in the ancient Jewish view(s).*
This means that "Fool" moved from a meaning close to "an objectionable or obnoxious person" toward "a person without intellectual wisdom" over centuries, while "jerk" apparently has gone the opposite direction within just a few recent decades.
* I'm far from an expert at this.
It always confused me when my grandparents would call someone who was perfectly nice a "jerk", and it wasn't until I watched the Steve Martin movie four or five years ago that I understood why.
I always found it notable because it seemed to be ascribed to behavior of that special and peculiar class where The behavior benefits the man over the concerns of the woman, with an undercurrent that the women will tolerate it because the man is of a high reproductive value.
Often to me the behavior rises to what I would think would be despicable, that is something that should result in social rejection.
I'm hoping to not unleash an incel argument here.
For example, here's a famous clip from Norm MacDonald. https://youtu.be/JBrVPv-wiww
In 1979, kids may have been using it to mean "asshole" but the writers were in their 30s and definitely meant it to mean "idiot"
By the end of the '80s, the "idiot" usage seems to be completely gone.
It didn't mean that someone used race as a form of prejudice. But for decades this hasn't been the case, and it is almost exclusively used to describe someone who uses prejudice or discriminates others on the basis of race or ethnicity.
And now we no longer have a colloquial or formal single word for someone who holds racial supremacist views, because the two ideas have commingled.
Just as interesting to me is the fact I've never (i don't think) had a practical use for the 4th derivative, jounce (think this is a British English term, American is snap i believe). The only place i've seen it used is in car suspension design.
Since graduating over 30 years ago, I’ve only ever used or cited crackle and pop on internet message boards or as trivia, never in actual engineering.
To be crude but accurate, we're looking at semantic drift from a jerk being a jerk off to a jerk ass.
> 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,
No, they didn't. It's well documented the meaning was already changing in the 70s. "The Jerk" the movie might make it seem ambiguous but usage meaning "obnoxious/asshole" was common in the 70s and 80s. Dictionary defintions just mean they were out of date to common usage.
It doesn't help that you can warp the "idiot" meaning into the "obnoxious" meaning in the form of "If you'd stop being stupid you'd realize your being obnoxious".
> 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.”
Could be fun to talk about the “instantaneous jerk”, “integrating the jerk”, and the “average jerk”.
Could be because the original "ass = stupid" is possibly related not to ass = arse, but to ass = donkey?
"Donkey-hole", OTOH, is meaningless, so "asshole" rather definitely means "arsehole".
Punk: prostitute / catamite -> worthless / degenerate -> confrontational / obnoxious
Nice: silly / foolish -> fussy / fastidious -> pleasant / good
And "nice" is often used sarcastically, so you could see how the common meaning might in future go full circle.
DonHopkins 11 months ago | parent | context | favorite | on: The PERQ Computer
The predecessor to the "Blit" at Bell Labs was originally named the "Jerq" as a rude play on "Perq" borrowed by permission from Lucasfilm, and the slogan was "A Jerq at Every Desk".
PERQ workstation:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PERQ
Blit (computer terminal):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blit_(computer_terminal)
>The folk etymology for the Blit name is that it stands for Bell Labs Intelligent Terminal, and its creators have also joked that it actually stood for Bacon, Lettuce, and Interactive Tomato. However, Rob Pike's paper on the Blit explains that it was named after the second syllable of bit blit, a common name for the bit-block transfer operation that is fundamental to the terminal's graphics.[2] Its original nickname was Jerq, inspired by a joke used during a demo of a Three Rivers' PERQ graphic workstation and used with permission.
https://inbox.vuxu.org/tuhs/CAKzdPgz37wwYfmHJ_7kZx_T=-zwNJ50...
From: Rob Pike <robpike@gmail.com>
To: Norman Wilson <norman@oclsc.org>
Cc: The Eunuchs Hysterical Society <tuhs@tuhs.org>
Subject: Re: [TUHS] Blit source
Date: Thu, 19 Dec 2019 11:26:47 +1100 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <CAKzdPgz37wwYfmHJ_7kZx_T=-zwNJ50PhS7r0kCpuf_F1mDkww@mail.gmail.com> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <1576714621.27293.for-standards-violators@oclsc.org>
[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 890 bytes --]
Your naming isn't right, although the story otherwise is accurate.
The Jerq was the original name for the 68K machines hand-made by Bart. The
name, originally coined for a fun demo of the Three Rivers Perq by folks at
Lucasfilm, was borrowed with permission by us but was considered unsuitable
by Sam Morgan as we reached out to make some industrially, by a company
(something Atlantic) on Long Island. So "Blit" was coined. The Blit name
later stuck unofficially to the DMD-5620, which was made by Teletype and,
after some upheavals, had a Western Electric BellMac 32000 CPU.
If 5620s were called Jerqs, it was an accident. All the software with that
name would be for the original, Locanthi-built and -designed 68K machines.
The sequence is thus Jerq, Blit, DMD-5620. DMD stood for dot-mapped rather
than bit-mapped, but I never understood why. It seemed a category error to
me.
-rob
The original name was Jerq, which was first the name given by friends at
Lucasfilm to the Three Rivers PERQ workstations they had, for which the
Pascal-written software and operating system were unsatisfactory. Bart
Locanthi and I (with Greg Chesson and Dave Ditzel?) visited Lucasfilm in
1981 and we saw all the potential there with none of the realization. My
personal aha was that, as on the Alto, only one thing could be running at a
time and that was a profound limitation. When we began to design our answer
to these problems a few weeks later, we called Lucasfilm to ask if they
minded us borrowing their excellent rude name, and they readily agreed.
Our slogan: A jerq at every desk.You must have enough material for an autobiography. Have you ever thought of writing one? I’d buy that.
After this specialization, from general stupidity to obnoxious and irritating stupidity, it is a small shift to pure obnoxiousness, implying moral but not intellectual inferiority.
But why, of many suitable words, "jerk" was the one who made this transition? Who is responsible?
IF, that is, your memory is better than Dave Berry's...
aspenmayer•5mo ago