jive

Jive first appears in American English records around 1928, initially meaning 'to talk nonsense, to speak deceptively, to talk a lot without saying much.' The word emerged from African American vernacular in Harlem at the height of the jazz age, and its probable African origin is the Wolof word jev (also spelled jeu), meaning 'to talk disparagingly about someone in their absence.' Wolof is the dominant language of Senegal and the Gambia and was one of the major languages spoken by enslaved Africans brought to the Americas, particularly to the coastal regions of Georgia and South Carolina and to the Caribbean. Linguist David Dalby's research in the 1960s and 1970s proposed many Wolof sources for African American vernacular words, and jive is among the more linguistically convincing of these proposed etymologies, though absolute certainty about such borrowings is impossible to achieve given the conditions under which enslaved people were brought to the Americas.

By the 1930s and 1940s, jive had expanded its meaning significantly. From the original sense of deceptive or empty talk, it extended to the music itself: jive became a term for a style of swing jazz, and 'jive talk' or 'jive' became the name for the highly metaphorical, inventive slang used by jazz musicians and their communities. Cab Calloway published a Cab Calloway's Cat-ologue: A 'Hepster's' Dictionary of jive terms in 1938 — a glossary of the slang that his audiences were hearing but perhaps not understanding. The dictionary itself became a cultural artifact, a snapshot of a vernacular that was both opaque to outsiders and precisely communicative within the community. Jive talk had developed a vocabulary distinctive enough to require a translation guide.

The dance form also called jive — a fast, acrobatic partner dance descended from the Lindy hop and associated with swing jazz — brought the word into physical as well as musical usage. The jive was one of the dances that horrified moral guardians in the 1940s for its apparent sexual abandon and physical daring. It was exactly this transgressive energy, the movement vocabulary that could not be contained within existing European dance forms, that made it irresistible to young people across racial lines. When white teenagers in Britain began dancing the jive to American records in the late 1940s and early 1950s, they were participating in a cultural transmission whose origins ran back through Harlem, through the American South, through the Middle Passage, to the communities on the West African coast that spoke Wolof.

The word jive accumulated further meanings as it spread. By the mid-twentieth century, 'jive' as an adjective could mean fake, worthless, or dishonest — as in 'that's a jive explanation' — while the phrase 'jive talk' could describe any kind of elaborate evasion. The verb 'to jive' could mean to make sense or agree ('that doesn't jive with what I know'), a usage that inverted the original sense of deceptive talk into its opposite: truthful alignment. This semantic expansion is typical of particularly generative slang words, which accumulate meanings as they spread through different communities and contexts. By the time jive entered mainstream English dictionaries, it had accrued so many meanings that it functioned almost as a separate mini-vocabulary.