• 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.
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!
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.
Possibly also because of the phonetic similarity with "ciao"?
> “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.
> 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.
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.
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.
aspenmayer•2h ago