An Alphabet of Feminism #10: J is for Jade
J
JADE
Stones on Parade.
A word that may suggest stones or horses, depending on your point of view. Naturally, these senses are distinct, and jade is accordingly given two separate entries in the dictionary.
Jade Burial Mask of King Pakal (Mayan), National Museum of Anthropology and History, Mexico City, via flickr user chaostrophy.
The first refers to the stone, itself a hybrid of ‘two distinct minerals’, which ‘for their hardness have been used for implements and ornaments’. These two, Nephrite and Jadeite, originate in different languages (lithos nephritikos and l’ejade respectively), but connect at the identical meaning ‘kidney / colic stones’, in allusion to jade‘s perceived medicinal properties. Famously fascinating to Chinese artists in particular, from as far back as the Shang dynasty, jade was also valued for its hardness and concomitant indestructibility (hence its use in burials, as in the Mayan example on the left) – much more than a simple gemstone.
A Horse of a Different Colour
Jade‘s lexical half-brother form is of unknown origin, though possibly connected to ‘yaud’ via the Icelandic ‘jalda’ (= ‘mare’). Its first citation appears around 1386, and here jade is glossed as ‘a contemptuous name for a horse’, or ‘a horse as opposed to a riding horse’. Its pejorative status may explain its feminine etymology: mares were generally used in Days Of Yore for more everyday work than that chosen for stallions and geldings, losing their rights to many of the Sexy Jobs (racing, fighting, hunting, fishin’, shootin’) because of their perceived Attitude Problems, especially during estrous.
I am, alas, no equine expert so I cannot claim to know how much of this derives from suspicious anthropomorphism and how much from observable truth. It sounds as dubious as similar assertions that ‘all’ women are mardy, but if some horse-fancier out there can prove otherwise, well, I bow to your superior wisdom, and toddle back tail-drawn to the dictionary, where it is safe and warm.
Bring On The Dancing Horses.
More vaguely, jade can signify a rather delicious list of equine insults: ‘a roadster, a hack, a sorry inconditioned wearied or worn out horse; a vicious, worthless, ill tempered horse’, but (and the dictionary is very specific on this point), it is only ‘rarely’ applied to a donkey. In extended meaning, it can be ‘generally’ applied to a horse in a kind of affectionate usage ‘without depreciatory sense’, where its main appearance is in Renaissance comedy. Thus, in Jonson’s beautiful Alchemist (c.1610), the servant Face resents being made to ‘stalk like a mill-jade’.
Alas, since the decline of horses as a major method of transportation, the utility of a catch-all insult for useless specimens has come into question, and nowadays the word is rare. We are left with the slightly more familiar sense, arriving in the 1550s, as ‘a term of reprobation applied to a woman‘. In this instance, it is unclear exactly what it means: its citations largely sound like tautologies, as in ‘an expensive jade of a wife’ (from the Spectator in 1722), and I suppose its significance is in extending the ‘useless’ tag of the original equine. Indeed, given the dictionary’s conservative tendencies over citations (and the early date for this last term) we can assume that these first and second uses of jade are feeding off each other, and probably almost synonymous.
However, like its original horsey meaning, jade as a woman can also be jocular, apparently in alignment with ‘hussy or minx‘; and this latter may, incidentally, derive its playfulness in extension from another animal origin, mynx (‘a puppy’) and / or the Middle Dutch minnekijn, meaning ‘darling’ or ‘sweetheart’. We might also think of Minnie, herself a sort of feminist icon, if you will.
Oh, Man.
But one of the surprising things about this surprising word is its gender neutrality: thus its third meaning, in application to a man, ‘usually in some figure drawing from sense 1’, that is, (here we are again) back to horse insults. This is the usage it has in The Taming of The Shrew, an early Shakespeare release that titularly plays with subordinating occasionally recalcitrant beasts and frequently riles audiences with its ostensibly despicable gender-politics:
Petruchio: …Come, sit on me,
Katherina: Asses are made to bear, and so are you.
Petruchio: Women are made to bear, and so are you.
Katherina: No such jade as you, if me you mean.William Shakespeare, The Taming Of The Shrew (c.1590-4) II.i.198-201.
The ‘Shrew’, Katherina, here dubs her ‘Tamer’ a jade in this third sense, playing with the punning meanings of ‘bear’ that have immediately preceded. Asses are made to bear; so are women. Oh ho. Fun with zeugmas.
But Katherina gives as good as she gets, Minnie-style, using jade to succinctly imply that Petruchio is the sexual equivalent of ‘a sorry, ill-conditioned or worn out horse’ (which in asexual extension gives us jaded as ‘worn out, cynical’ – probably the only form of this word still in common use). That the horse in question may have began lexical life as a ‘mare’ seems contextually unimportant, since nowhere in the history of sexual politics is a woman expected to ‘keep up’ or indeed do much more than ‘fall back’. Nonetheless, it is interesting that the male should be attacked here on explicitly sexual territory, which also draws attention to jade‘s arguable antonyms, ‘stallion’, and ‘stud’.
So where does jade leave us now? Sometime around the 1970s, it was the first sense of the word that spawned the (unisex) name meaning ‘jewel’ or ‘precious stone’, as indeed jade the gem now endures in everyday language. But the flip-side of this now almost obsolete word is its punning sexual suggestiveness, where it is interesting to note that this is one ostensibly female word that turns back to bite its male accusers. A jade’s trick indeed.
NEXT WEEK: K is for Knickerbocker
“Nag” is another word for an inferior horse, and also serves as ‘a term of reprobation applied to a woman‘. Hmmmmm….
Yes – I think we considered “nag” for N, but to avoid duplicating I think Hodge is going to pick something else for that. But “jade” absolutely dovetails with “nag”.
Wonder what the etymology of “nag” is now. *to the dictionary!*
I have the origins of nag listed as
nag (v.)
“annoy by scolding,” 1828, originally a dialectal word, probably ultimately from a Scandinavian source (cf. O.N. gnaga “to complain,” lit. “to bite, gnaw,” dialectal Swed. and Norw. nagga “to gnaw”) related to O.E. gnagan “to gnaw” (see gnaw). Related: Nagged; nagger; nagging.
nag (n.)
“old horse,” c.1400, nagge “small riding horse,” of unknown origin, perhaps related to Du. negge, neg (but these are more recent than the English word). Term of abuse is a transferred sense, first recorded 1590s.
There you go!
My Mum calls my sister a cheeky mare quite often. Don’t know if that’s another historical equine insult or just my mum though.
I, too, have heard “cheeky mare”… but perhaps only in the mouths of women. I can’t recall hearing a man call a woman a “mare”.
A curious aspect of applying equine terms to women is that horse riding seems very largely a female activity. I don’t base that any statistics, merely on personal observation. When I visit the countryside, I see women and girls riding — but can’t recall when I last saw a man or boy doing so.
Well, there’s the idea that the *Shrew* talks about, of ‘bearing’, ‘riding’ etc. Horses can be a kind of renaissance equivalent to ‘the village bicycle’ or, via punning reference to ‘bearing’, they can be the maternal woman.
Horse riding is a very interesting historical phenomenon, of course – it’s one of the activities that spearheaded androgynous clothing, for example, but it’s also something that can be a womanly accomplishment (and display of spiritedness, in a good way).
Don’t forget side-saddle, too – was hoping to find a better video, but Bonnie in Gone With The Wind is a lovely (if very silly) little vignette of little girls and riding (and it’s the thing about Bonnie that Rhett Butler is most proud of) (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OJYCdCqf1Lw). If you remember, Rhett originally teaches her to ride like a man but then Mammie says this ‘ain’t fittin”, thus indirectly precipitating her death.
Ah side saddle! That raises a whole host of issues. In my novel “Margaret”, I wished my hero (Margaret) to sit astride the horse, but thought that she might well have been obliged to learn to ride side saddle. For that reason, I made side saddle/astride a class issue as well as a gender one. I’m not sure whether (historically) it has been a class issue, but class and gender issues are certainly often entangled with each other. This conversation takes place before Margaret’s first riding lesson:
“We have a pair of riding boots for her, of course,” my mother replied, “silly for Margaret not to have put them on this morning. And I agree that a plainer, darker coloured dress would be more appropriate, or perhaps a skirt and blouse. But Margaret has no breeches. Surely you don’t envisage her sitting astride the pony?”
“Of course, I do!” Miss Fletcher said heartily. “Side saddle may be all very well for a country physician’s wife, or the daughter of a penny-counter in the city. But Margaret is a princess — the Blood Victoria roars through her veins.”
“Quite right!” grandfather added with considerable emphasis. “My own dear mother — may the goddesses be kind to her — always rode astride. She was what you might call a roaring woman. Of course, Carlotta, Margaret’s grandmother — may the goddesses touch her gently — was different, a more feminine lady.”
“Indeed she was,” mother agreed. “And she saw nothing wrong in my riding side saddle — quite the reverse.”
“Yes,” grandfather said, I thought a little sadly, “but, although I loved Carlotta dearly, she wasn’t from what I’d call one of the first families.”
“She came from solid and respectable stock,” my mother retorted angrily.
“Quite, quite, my dear.” Then, addressing Miss Fletcher, rather than my mother, grandfather continued: “You see, I was the fourth son, never expected to inherit the title, so there was no bar to my marrying whomsoever I chose. Then…” he counted on his fingers, “Ronald died in a hunting accident — savage nazeman — Stewart was slain battle — a cavalry charge against Melissa Murder’s artillery — and John fell to some plague or other. So I found myself with the earldom, although my wife’s family weren’t quite as one might expect.”
Oh God, Gone With the Wind! I grew up with that movie. I hadn’t realised it was riding side-saddle that did for Bonnie! I just thought it was her reckless “just like papa” haste and speed! Fascinating stuff.
Hodge, we need to have a film night.
Well, I’m stretching Rhett’s warning ‘Now Bonnie, you’ve only just learnt to ride side-saddle’ to its ultimate possible extent, but it makes sense. When he first starts teaching her, I think it’s supposed to show how much he loves her, and how she’s inherited his sort of bravery and dashingness, cos he’s determined that she should be able to out-ride every man and woman in the county…
“Its pejorative status may explain its feminine etymology: mares were generally used in Days Of Yore for more everyday work than that chosen for stallions and geldings, losing their rights to many of the Sexy Jobs (racing, fighting, hunting, fishin’, shootin’) because of their perceived Attitude Problems, especially during estrous.”
“I am, alas, no equine expert so I cannot claim to know how much of this derives from suspicious anthropomorphism and how much from observable truth. It sounds as dubious as similar assertions that ‘all’ women are mardy, but if some horse-fancier out there can prove otherwise, well, I bow to your superior wisdom, and toddle back tail-drawn to the dictionary, where it is safe and warm.”
I am also, alas, no equine expert, but would be extremely interested to learn the truth of this matter. My novels, set in a future without the internal combustion engine, feature horses and ponies to a considerable extent. I have taken the liberty (in my fiction) of reversing the historical attitude to equines of one or other sex — and have made mares the preferred mounts. I did this by gut feeling, or perhaps an extended feminism, rather than any solid information. I’d love to know whether I’ve written nonsense in this regard.
In Francis Grose’s 1785 slang dictionary ‘The Vulgar Tongue’, there’s no mention of the horsey meaning of jade. Just women.
‘Jade: a term of reproach to women.’
Excellent as always, Hodge. :)
Does Francis expand on that? One of the things I found really strange when looking at this word was that no-one ever seems to explain what this ‘term of reproach’ actually means – is it sexual? to do with messiness? nagging? As I say in the article, I just ended up assuming it was a simple transf. sense from ‘worthless horse’ (which makes it pretty much the exact opposite to ‘Jade’ as a name), but then ‘slut’ originally just meant ‘slattern’ and then the idea of slovenliness in dress got extended to slovenliness in morals. Yet Jade never really seems to progress out of a simple expanded use of the horse sense.
Funny.
Thanks for reading!
I hope I’m not intruding upon this old discussion, but I wonder if the pejorative sense of useless horse may be biblical in origin. In this sense the man is the horse and the spirit is the rider; a rider-less horse is a man without spirit, without direction or guidance in other words a wild and or ‘useless’ horse.
The meaning of jaded seems even more direct- ‘To become weary or spiritless’