Today the word “jazz” is most often associated with the likes of Ella Fitzgerald and Miles Davis. But before the term ever described the popular music genre, it referred to another quintessentially American pastime: baseball. 

In the 1910s, sportswriters coined the word with regard to changes in strategy and how the game was being played. This isn’t to say that Babe Ruth picked up a saxophone and played it to celebrate each dinger. Instead, “jazz” was used to describe lively pitches such as the curveball, which were becoming increasingly common. Let’s do a deeper dive into the origins of the word and examine how it later transitioned to the world of music.

Before “jazz,” there was “jasm” — a word meaning “drive” or “energy” that was coined in the mid-19th century. One of the earliest known uses of that term came in Josiah Gilbert Holland’s 1860 novel Miss Gilbert’s Career: An American Story, which featured the line, “If you’ll take thunder and lightning, and a steamboat and a buzz-saw, and mix ’em up, and put ’em into a woman, that’s jasm.” As best as anyone can tell, “jasm” eventually inspired the word “jazz.” However, the latter wasn’t coined until over a half century later.

In 1912, as minor league pitcher Ben Henderson was preparing the day before his opening day start for the Portland Beavers against the Los Angeles Angels, he spoke with a reporter for the Los Angeles Times. “I got a new curve this year,” he said before the game. “I call it the Jazz ball because it wobbles and you simply can’t do anything with it.” The next day, on April 2, 1912, an article titled “Ben’s Jazz Curve” ran in the Los Angeles Times, and while that season was Henderson’s last, the word “jazz” persisted.

The word “jazz” spread throughout the game and appeared in baseball-related contexts many times thereafter, including in a series of baseball articles that ran in the San Francisco Bulletin in March 1913. It soon expanded to describe other sports-related events. A 1915 article in the Daily Californian discussed how “jazz” could liven up a crowd and propel a team to victory: “This spirit of heartiness is carried to the bleachers … It puts fight into the team, ‘jazz’ into the rooting section, and has helped win games for Stanford and Washington.”

In just three years time, the term had gone from describing a minor league baseball player’s tricks to taking the sporting world by storm. But it was in the mid-1910s that the term made its inevitable transition to music.

Around the year 1915, the word “jazz” emerged in a new musical context. Chicago-based newspapers began referring to a popular peppy music genre as “jazz,” which drew influences from the blues and ragtime styles that preceded it.

It’s worth noting that the term wasn’t immediately adopted by musicians, according to music historian Lewis Porter. “Jazz” seemed to be a linguistic creation of white musicians “up North” (which likely meant Chicago), rather than the Black musicians who were playing and developing the genre further south in New Orleans. Porter adds that musicians such as Duke Ellington, Max Roach, and Sidney Bechet all felt similarly about the idea of “jazz music” being a white invention. In his autobiography, Treat It Gentle, Bechet wrote, “Jazz, that’s a name the white people have given to the music.” Instead, those musicians were likely to claim they were playing a version of ragtime rather than jazz.

Nevertheless, the term “jazz” stuck around the music scene, and by the 1920s, it described any type of dance music including waltzes and foxtrots, rather than the jazz we know today. It also came to refer to a way of life; in his 1922 work Tales of the Jazz Age, F. Scott Fitzgerald uses “jazz” to describe a broader cultural movement in which people cast aside the strict rules of the past in favor of a free and more wild lifestyle.

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Unless you’re discussing all-star infielder Jazz Chisholm Jr., it’s been a long time since anyone used “jazz” in the context of baseball. Today it’s primarily used one of two ways. First and foremost, “jazz” refers to the genre of music filled with improvisation, scatting, and syncopated rhythms. This use dates back to the 1950s, when rock ’n’ roll was becoming increasingly popular. Around that time, “jazz” was used to differentiate the distinct musical genre more closely associated with artists such as Miles Davis. 

But some Black musicians in the genre still did not embrace the word “jazz” — in 1972’s What “Jazz” Means to Me, drummer Max Roach said, “The term ‘jazz’ has come to mean the abuse and exploitation of black musicians.” Trumpeter Nicholas Payton suggested the alternative of “Black American Music,” though that’s yet to catch on. Many others, however, came to accept the term “jazz” and didn’t express strong views on the matter. 

In a non-musical context,“jazz” as a verb can also refer to the idea of “jazzing” something up in an effort to make it more exciting, playing off the original meaning of something that exudes pep or vitality.

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Bennett Kleinman

Staff Writer

Bennett Kleinman is a New York City-based staff writer for Inbox Studio. He is also a freelance comedy writer, devoted New York Yankees and New Jersey Devils fan, and thinks plain seltzer is the best drink ever invented.

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Cursive, less technically known as “joined-up writing,” is any style of penmanship in which characters are written in a flowing manner without breaks in between. In theory, this makes writing faster and, when well executed, more aesthetically pleasing, particularly in contrast to block letters. In France, children start learning to write in cursive as early as kindergarten, where they learn a specific style of handwriting known as French cursive. 

French cursive has its own unique characteristics that make it instantly recognizable, at least to anyone familiar with European penmanship traditions. It comes from the French ronde (“round”) script, which was meant to lend the characters a round look when taken together. This script appeared in France at the end of the 16th century and was taught in French schools until the 20th century. French cursive, which maintains some of the loops and flourishes of the earlier ronde, was later standardized as part of France’s national education system, ensuring greater consistency in handwriting instruction across the country.

The most notable feature of French cursive is its emphasis on graceful loops and rounded strokes, which can make the script more ornate than, say, its English counterparts. And while French cursive letters can be written at a slant, they are often written at an angle of 90 degrees from the line — in other words, they’re more upright than letters in many other cursive styles, including the cursive typically taught in American schools. 

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Some letters in French cursive have unique shapes. For example, the lowercase “p” has an open loop that doesn’t connect the curve to the downstroke of the “p.” Capital letters, meanwhile, frequently include decorative flourishes and very prominent loops. The capital “X,” for one, has so many loops, it nearly resembles a petal or a four-leaf clover. Many letters also tend to begin with a small eyelet, a rounded embellishment that further adds to the all-around elegance of French cursive. 

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Tony Dunnell

Word Smarts Writer

Tony Dunnell is an English writer living on the edge of the Amazon rainforest. When not writing articles on a range of subjects, he dedicates his time to writing speculative fiction. His short stories have appeared in Escape Pod, Daily Science Fiction, Sci Phi Journal and elsewhere. Find him at tonydunnell.com.

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The Appalachian region of the United States stretches from southern New York all the way south to Alabama and Mississippi. This area of rolling mountains and valleys is home to some 26 million people, as well as one of America’s most distinctive dialects: Appalachian English. Often stereotyped or dismissed as “incorrect” English, Appalachian English is actually a distinct dialect with its own consistent grammar rules, vocabulary, and pronunciation patterns. (While it does share many common characteristics with Southern American English, it has enough unique features to be considered apart.) Appalachian English also has a strong claim to being one of the oldest dialects in the United States. Its roots go as far back as the earliest European settlements in America.

According to Margaret E. L. Renwick, Ph.D., a linguist and associate research professor at Johns Hopkins University, Appalachian English developed from a combination of Scotch Irish, German, and English communities who settled in the United States at the beginning of the 1730s. These settlers then migrated into the more isolated, higher-elevation areas of the Appalachian Mountains. They naturally brought with them the distinctive pronunciation patterns and grammatical structures of their European homelands, with each group contributing linguistic elements that eventually merged to create the distinctive dialect now known as Appalachian English. 

Because of the geographical isolation of the Appalachian communities, the dialect developed over centuries with limited contact with outside linguistic influences. Because of this, Appalachian English has retained similarities with 18th-century colonial American English. It’s commonly stated that Appalachian English is a surviving relic of Elizabethan English,  and that the dialect has preserved a Shakespearean way of speaking from the 16th century. This, however, is a myth. Appalachian English does contain some words that were used by Shakespeare, such as “afeared” to mean “afraid” and “holp” to mean “helped,” but the connection is tenuous at best. 

As noted by linguist Michael Montgomery in Language Myths, Appalachian English may have “more archaisms than other types of American English, but that’s about it.” So, while the Appalachian dialect may have preserved, to some extent, a way of speaking heard in the early colonial days, it’s unlikely that Shakespeare sounded like someone from Chattanooga, Tennessee.

Appalachian English contains several grammatical features that distinguish it from standard American English. One of the most notable is the use of what is known as A-prefixing, in which “a-“ attaches to a verb form with the suffix “-ing,” as in, “He was a-hunting” or “She’s a-coming.” (A-prefixing exists in Scottish and Irish dialects, which may explain its appearance in Appalachian English.) 

The dialect also employs distinctive verb forms, including “done” as a helping verb to indicate a completed action (“I done told you”) and unique past-tense forms for certain verbs. Additionally, it features double modals, such as “might could” or “used to could.” Another common phenomenon is the pronunciation of a final “uh” sound as a “y” — for example, “extra” may sound like “extry” and “opera” like “opery.” (The legendary country music show and venue “The Grand Ole Opry” owes its name to this dialect.)

In terms of vocabulary, Appalachian English includes many words that have disappeared from other American dialects. Examples include “airish” (“chilly”), “chancy” (“doubtful”), “everly” (“constantly”), “prettyful” (“beautiful”), “poke” (“paper bag”), and “whistle pig” (“groundhog”). 

Speakers of Appalachian English often face linguistic discrimination and negative stereotypes that portray their speech as uneducated or inferior. These discriminatory attitudes ignore the rich history behind the dialect and typically reflect broader prejudices about rural and working-class communities. For speakers of Appalachian English, their dialect represents far more than just a way of communicating — it embodies cultural identity, belonging, and connection to place.

Increasingly, it’s not only linguists who recognize the importance of documenting and respecting Appalachian English as a legitimate, fascinating, and historically significant dialect. In 2019, Tennessee became the first state to officially recognize and honor Appalachian English, calling it a “fully legitimate dialect and most deserving of the respect afforded other dialects of American English.” 

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That’s not to say, however, that the future of the Appalachian dialect is assured. It continues to be stigmatized, while also facing challenges from increased mobility, education policies that discourage dialect use, and the powerful influence of media (and social media) that promotes standard American English. But the dialect remains strong in many communities, adapting to the ever-changing nature of modern life while maintaining its distinctive character — as it has done for the last few centuries. 

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Tony Dunnell

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Tony Dunnell is an English writer living on the edge of the Amazon rainforest. When not writing articles on a range of subjects, he dedicates his time to writing speculative fiction. His short stories have appeared in Escape Pod, Daily Science Fiction, Sci Phi Journal and elsewhere. Find him at tonydunnell.com.

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The concept of doing business back in the Middle Ages is difficult for the modern mind to comprehend. They didn’t accept Apple Pay, credit cards were still centuries away, and merchants were likely to charge you amounts such as “twelfty.” This odd-sounding term comes from the Old English “hundtwelftig,” meaning “20 past 100.” In other words, it’s how folks in the Middle Ages referred to the number 120.

While the English-speaking world primarily uses a base-10 counting system today, there was a time when early Germanic peoples used base-12. This put emphasis on multiples of 12 such as 120, 1,200, and so on. In a 1993 academic paper, historian Julian Goodare explains how “twelfty” was predominantly used from the early Middle Ages through the middle of the 17th century. It was part of the duodecimal system in which people counted by 12s rather than 10s.

Goodare adds that “twelfty” was also referred to as the “long hundred” (compared to 100, which was called the “short hundred”). Similarly, the number 1,200 was known as the “long thousand.” But in the latter half of the 17th century, base-10 superseded the duodecimal system. In turn, the word “twelfty” became less popular and fell into disuse.

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Despite the terms’ fade into obscurity, the words of this archaic counting system may very well have caught the attention of author J.R.R. Tolkien centuries later. In The Fellowship of the Ring, he coined the phrase “eleventy-one” to describe Bilbo Baggins turning 111 years old. Given that Tolkien was a widely respected and well-educated linguist, this reference may have been a clever nod to the word “twelfty.”

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Bennett Kleinman

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Bennett Kleinman is a New York City-based staff writer for Inbox Studio. He is also a freelance comedy writer, devoted New York Yankees and New Jersey Devils fan, and thinks plain seltzer is the best drink ever invented.

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