En Passant – There’s more to Jack than Jill

IT IS AMAZING how the mind works. Someone in the office was talking about, or trying to remember the name of someone else,  and said, “You know, that man who cuts down trees,” and I said, “What, like a lumberjack? Like in (and I started to sing):
“I’m a lumberjack, and I’m okay.
“I sleep all night and I work all day.
“I cut down trees. I skip and jump.
“I like to press wild flowers.
“I put on women’s clothing
“And hang around in bars.”
And then I started thinking why “lumberjack”? I mean, lumber I understand, it’s timber, wood, logs, etc, but where does “jack” come from? The only other similar job-related “jack” I could think of was a “steeplejack”, you know, the bloke who fixes and constructs steeples and chimneys, especially tall chimneys at factories.
And then in English we have the phrase “Jack of all trades” which is a bloke who can do all sorts of things, like a real “MacGyver”, except that it is used sometimes in a derogatory way with the addition of “…and master of none”.
So I turned to my dictionary, my Collins Concise Dictionary of the English Language nogal, and looked up “jack”. Well, I tell you, there’s a lot more to “jack” than you might immediately think:
1. a man or fellow. (OK, so that makes sense – a lumberjack is a lumber man.)
2. a sailor. (Yep, I’ve heard of sailors being called a jack tar, mostly in books about the olden days, when sailors, as I understand it, spent some time filling gaps in their ship’s hull with tar.)
3. the male of certain animals, for example, a donkey. (Like a jackass, I suppose, although the jackdaw bird and the jack rabbit can be male or female.)
4. a mechanical or hydraulic device for exerting a large force, like for example, lifting your car so you can change the wheel. (Yep, you jack up your car using a jack, so I suppose jack can be a verb too.)
5. any of several mechanical devices, such as that which rotates meat on a spit. (Now this I did not know. That motorised arrangement that rotates the skaap on a spitbraai is called a jack.)
6. one of four playing cards in a pack, yeah, you know, jack of spades etc. (In a deck of cards the jack is also called the knave, which archaically was a dishonest man or a rogue. I cannot think of a card game in which the jacks are “dishonest”, can you?)
7. in bowls, a small white bowl at which the players aim their bigger bowls. (Yeah, I knew that, and it’s also sometimes called the “kitty”. But why is it called the jack? I dunno; some say it comes from the Latin jactus, to cast or throw, and others that jack sometimes has meant a slightly smaller version of something, and that the original “jack-bowl”, in other words the smaller bowl, became in time “jack”.)
8. a socket and plug connection in electrical equipment. (Ok, yes, I’ve heard of a jack plug – there are some at the back of my stereo. And apparently you plug in an electric guitar with a jack plug, and the old manual telephone exchanges used to use jack plugs to connect calls. Why it’s called a jack nobody seems absolutely sure.)
9. a flag, especially a small flag flown at the bow of a ship. (And remember that the flag of Great Britain is often called the Union Jack.)
10. in Australia, jack is slang for venereal disease. (Nope, this I did not know; this only an Australian could understand. “G’day, mite, wotcher scratchin’ dahn theer, hay, got the jack, have ‘er?” And then, in Australia, you have to wonder what they
understand by “Jack-in-the-box”?)
11. a part of the mechanical action of a harpsichord. (Unlike the piano which has little felt hammers to hit the strings, a harpsichord plucks the strings, and as I understand it, and I don’t, the jack is part of the mechanics that makes this possible.)
12a. any of various tropical and subtropical fishes.(I’ve heard of these fish – didn’t there used to be a tinned fish on the shelves called jack-something or something-jack?)
12b. an immature pike. (Why? Does the immature pike look like a jack fish?)
13. one of the pieces used in the game of jacks. (My sister had a set of jacks made of brass, and kept in a little pull-string bag. I never understood the game.)
14. in the good ol’ USA, slang for money. (Really? I’ve watched, I dunno, hundreds of American movies over the years and I have no recollection of anyone calling money jack.)
And then there’s the well known nursery rhyme:
Jack and Jill went up the hill,
A stunt that’s very risky,
If water makes them act like that
I think I’ll stick to whisky.
And there you have it, all because someone wanted the name of the

bloke who cuts down trees.