A 1937 anti-jaywalking poster created under the auspices of the U. S. federal Works Projects Administration. Drawing of a pedestrian being struck by a car, the driver of which is horrified, while a policeman looks on helpless to prevent it. The caption reads: “Don’t Jaywalk. Watch Your Step.”
26 February 2021
Jaywalking is the act of crossing a street in the middle of the block, a disruptive, if not downright dangerous, practice. But why jay? That comes from an old sense of the bird’s name referring to a disagreeable or stupid person, a simpleton, a rube. Jays, while often beautiful in appearance, are disagreeable birds, driving away and stealing food from other birds. And a jaywalker thinks he owns the street, and cars just better get out of his way.
The word jay comes from the Old French jay (modern French geai). It makes its English appearance some time prior to 1350. We find the word in a love poem that appears in the manuscript British Library, Harley 2253, a manuscript which is a trove of early Middle English lyrics:
Heo is dereworthe in day:
Graciouse, stout, ant gay,
Gentil, jolyf so the jay,
Wohrliche when heo waketh.(She is precious by day:
Gracious, bold, and gay,
Gentle, jolly as the jay,
Beautiful when she wakes.)
In this poem, the bird is compared favorably to the speaker’s lover, but within a few centuries, poets were calling out the bird’s more disagreeable qualities. John Skelton, a satirist known for his innovative rhyme schemes, dubbed Skeltonics, was among the first to call a disagreeable person a jay. He does so in his 1523 poem Goodly Garlande, a 1600-line poem, modeled after Chaucer’s House of Fame, in which he praises his own poetry and places himself among the great poets. In this passage, he defends his poem Philip Sparrow, about the death of a pet sparrow, so while he is applying jay to critics who offer unconstructive criticism, the context retains the association with birds:
For the gyse now a days
Of sum iangrlyng iays
Is to discommende
what they can not amende
Though they wolde spende
All the wittis they haue
A century later, Shakespeare uses jay in this sense outside of the context of birds, indicating that the sense of a disagreeable or obtuse person had fully entered the language. From the play Cymbeline, which was written sometime before April 1611:
Thou didd’st accuse him of Incontinencie;
Thou then look’dst like a Villaine; now, methink es
Thy favours good enough. Some Iay of Italy
(Whose mother was her painting) hath betraid him.
The specific sense of a disagreeable or obtuse person who disrupts traffic by crossing the street in the middle of the block arises in Kansas City, Missouri in 1911, or at least that’s where it’s first recorded. An article in the Kansas City Star of 30 April 1911 has this to say about New Yorkers:
Gay New York or Jay New York—it is spelled both ways and either is correct.
[...]
Kansas City used to consider itself a town of jay walkers. That is another line in which New York deserves the discredit of being at the front of the procession. A typical Manhattian would be run over and trampled on the sidewalk if he tried to walk on State street in Chicago as he walks on Broadway, New York. He has never heard of the prehistoric principle of keeping to the right—he ambles all over the sidewalk. A facsimile of his trail would show that he had pursued a course as crooked as that of a serpent with a bun on. There ought to be a traffic policeman stationed on every corner to keep the pedestrians straightened out.
And around this time Kansas City was one of the first cities to pass an ordinance forbidding jay walking. An article in the Seattle Daily Times a year later takes note of this new law and discusses how the term came arose:
It seems that Kansas City, proud of her rank in twentieth place, has been getting metropolitan. Vehicular traffic having been regulated according to big-city notions or necessities, she has turned her attention to footfarers. Harking to the protestations of horse and motor drivers that many accidents have been due less to carelessness on their part than to the heedlessness of footers, she has ordained that persons may not walk across her streets, or her most frequented streets, except at crossings made and provided.
“Legislation of this sort rubs human nature the wrong way by seeming an arbitrary intrusion upon personal liberties. It’s a challenge to free-born citizens to cross streets wherever and however they blooming please. Wherefore by a happy inspiration Kansas City has cut the psychological knot and persuaded her most touchy citizens that they really prefer to observe the direction laid down in the ordinance. All this by the simple expedient of dubbing corner cutting “jay walking.”
Your true Kansas Citizen abhors above most things being deemed a jay—signifying a bumpkin, rube or gink. Rather than incur any such invidious thought he is prepared to walk rectangularly or any other way considered truly citified and comme il faut. By the magic phrase, jay walker, the hurried business man of the twentieth city has been redeemed from his devious and kittycornered path and made to walk rectilinearly if not uprightly in the fear of ridicule.
It seems that Kansas City struck upon an innovative way to promote civic virtue among its citizens. Shame can be a powerful tool when applied judiciously.
Sources:
“Ichot a Burde in Boure Bryht / Blow, Northerne Wynd.” The Complete Harley 2253 Manuscript, vol. 2 of 3. Susanna Greer Fein, ed. U of Rochester TEAMS Middle English Text Series, 2014. London, British Library, MS Harley 2252, fol. 72v.
“In Simple, Child-Like New York.” Kansas City Star, 30 April 1911, 4. Newsbank: America’s Historical Newspapers.
“Jay Walking.” Seattle Daily Times (Washington), 11 April 1912, 6. Newsbank: America’s Historical Newspapers.
Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. jay-walker, n., jay, n.
Shakespeare, William. Cymbeline, 3.4. First Folio, 1623, Oxford, Bodleian MS Arch. G c.7, 382–3.
Skelton, John. A Ryght Delectable Treatyse Upon a Goodly Garlande or Chapelet of Laurell. London: Richard Faukes, 1523, lines 1261–66.
Image credit: Isadore Posoff, Work Projects Administration Federal Art Project, Pennsylvania, 1937. Library of Congress. Public domain image.