jitterbug

Jitters meant nervous shaking in American English by the early 1900s, likely an alteration of chitter (to tremble). A jitterbug, by the 1930s, was slang for a person who drank too much and got the shakes. Cab Calloway, the bandleader, used the word in his 1934 song 'Call of the Jitter Bug,' describing someone who 'drinks his gin and whiskey' and gets the jitters. The word was a put-down. The jitterbug was the drunk in the corner.

Swing dancers took the insult and made it theirs. In the Harlem ballrooms of the late 1930s — the Savoy Ballroom in particular — dancers who performed fast, acrobatic swing moves were called jitterbugs by observers who thought they looked like they were shaking uncontrollably. The dancers did not mind. The energy, the apparent loss of control, the freedom in the limbs — these were the point. Jitterbug became the name for both the dance and the dancer.

The jitterbug crossed the Atlantic with American GIs during World War II. British, French, and German civilians learned the dance from servicemen stationed in their countries. In some European cities, jitterbugging was controversial — older generations saw it as vulgar, undisciplined, and too American. In Nazi Germany, it was actively suppressed. The German word for the dancers was Swing-Jugend (Swing Youth), and some were sent to concentration camps. A dance named after drunken shaking became a political act.

By the 1950s, jitterbug was giving way to rock and roll dancing, and the word gradually became archaic. It survives as a period term — a word that belongs specifically to the 1930s and 1940s, to big bands and ballroom floors and wartime. The insult became a dance, the dance became a movement, and the movement became history.