J j

J

SI-approved standard symbol and abbreviation for the SI-approved energy unit -- joule. A joule is 8.86 inch-pounds, in universal American units.

In the boring system, a joule is a newton meter. In terms of the earlier boring system, a joule would have been 10⁷ erg. Because metric units ignored Thomas Jefferson's (and others') wise suggestion and were not selected to make the acceleration of gravity at the earth's surface unity, one joule is 0.10972 kg-f × m, to reflect the conventional value of 9.80665 m/s² for the acceleration of gravity (that's g_n -- the standard acceleration of free fall). [kg-f is the weight of one kilogram of mass.]

One joule is also 1 Wh/3600, but that's the fault of Sumerians, who beqeathed us (they're all dead now, perhaps that's significant) a time-system that uses base 60.

If you believe in a calorie that is 4.1868 J, then 1 J = 0.238846 cal. You could have figured that out, I'm sure, but who could figure out the real calorie?

All my life, I've pronounced joule with an initial zh. Eventually I noticed that the eponym was James Prescott Joule, an Englishman, and that dictionaries give pronunciations of his name only with an ordinary j. I guess my pronunciation is an error due to phonetic bleed-through from the French name Jules, but I decided to stay with my solecism. If I have to keep hearing ``rih-JEEM'' (for regime) from newsfaces, I figure I've earned the right.

J

Jahwist. German spelling of Yahwist. Refers to a component of the Pentateuch, and its supposed author. The three other major components, to the extent that agreement exists, are E (Elohist), D (Deuteronomist) and P (Psalmist). E and J texts are concentrated in the early books, particularly Genesis, and distinguished by the use of JHWH (His name) and Elohim. The Deuteronomist uses both names. Stories with two tellings in the bible are typically attributed to two different authors.

In The Book of J, Harold Bloom speculated that the Jahwist was a woman in King Solomon's court.

J

Joint

• noun: a marijuana cigarette. Abbreviation pronounced and spelled `jay.'
• adjective: involving coordination of distinct military services. (E.g.: JAAP, JAN, JANUS, JAOC, JCCC, JCMEC, JCS, JDA, JDAL, JDEC, JDISS, JEZ, JFAST, JIEO, JLOTS, JOPES, JSF, JTA, and a different JTA.)
  It's more than just a word; it's a philosophy of cooperation at all levels, rather than just coordination at the top (the Joint Chiefs of Staff). Under the Goldwater-Nichols Reorganization Act of 1986, the JCS is an advisory body and the chain of command runs from the President through the Secretary of Defense directly to the commander of the combatant command. (The Secretaries of the Military Departments assign all fighting forces to joint combatant commands.)

J

Juliette. Not an abbreviation here, just the FCC-recommended ``phonetic alphabet.'' I.e., a set of words chosen to represent alphabetic characters by their initials. You know, ``Alpha Bravo Charlie ... .'' The idea behind the choice is to have words that the listener will be able to guess at or reconstruct accurately even through noise (or narrow bandwidth, like a telephone). Even though there are not as many words beginning in jay as there are beginning in some more popular alphabetic characters (like you-know-who and we-can-keep-a-secret), there are nevertheless quite enough thank you.

The recommendation for R is ``Romeo.''

J

A Scrabble tile worth eight points (or more, on a double- or triple- letter or word space, or if it's used in multiple words) (or negative eight, to the holder, if someone else uses up his or her tiles first). Therefore, it behooves you to study this important resource (words in the OSPD that contain the letter J).

In every Scrabble set, exactly one of the 100 tiles is a J. The other high-value letters (one tile each) are X (also 8 pts.), and Q and Z (ten points each).

JA

Job Approval.

JA

Junior Achievement.

JAA

Japanese Archaeological Association. Being a Japanese archaeologist must be a little bit like being the cherished daughter of a dictator. The Japanese government spends over a billion dollars annually on archaeological digs. (Why -- do you realize that's over a tenth of a trillion yen!?!) However, the most interesting archaeological sites, and the most controversial, are some 250 grave sites of the imperial family. These are guarded and regularly inspected by personnel of the Imperial Household Agency, and mostly off limits to everyone else.

It gives one a different perspective on the dog in the manger. Who knows what's hidden under that hay?

And in case you're wondering: after a number of marriages and countries, Svetlana Alliluyeva settled in England in the 1990's.

JAA

Japanese Association of Anatomists. From the inclusion of this entry, you can see just how hard up we were for entries in J.

JAAC

Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism. A JAAC subscription is free with membership in the American Society for Aesthetics (ASA).

JAAD

Journal of the American Academy of Dermatology.

JAAGL

Journal of the American Association of Gynecologic Laparoscopists.

Jaap

Dutch form of the name Jacob.

JAAP

Joint Airborne Advance Party. A joint (J) ground party that prepares for an airlift operation at the objective area.

Jabba

A Hutt.

Back in the 1980's and 1990's, there was a fad among Toyota light truck owners of personalizing their trucks by painting over one or some letters of the logo on the tailgate, so they would read

T O Y

or

  O Y     A

or any of the 60 other possibilities.

In April 2001, some Hooters restaurants owned by Gulf Coast Wings Inc. in Florida held a motivational contest for their employees. The names of the ten waitresses who sold the most beer in April at each of the area Hooters were entered in a drawing for a Toyota. The drawing was won by Jodee Berry, 26, a top-selling waitress at the Panama City Beach Hooters. Her boss, restaurant manager Jared Blair, had told his waitresses that he didn't know what kind of Toyota it would be -- a car, truck or van -- but the winner would be responsible for the tax on the vehicle.

Jodee learned in May that she had won the drawing. She was blindfolded and led to the restaurant parking lot, where the blindfold was removed and she saw that she had won a toy Yoda doll worth $40. The manager was inside laughing.

She quit the next week.

The above information was provided to the AP by Jodee Berry and her lawyer Stephen West. If I had been the source, you can be sure I would have called the waitresses ``waitpersons.'' I mean, just because you serve drinks at a place whose name and promotional campaigns imply that its servers are sexy ``girls'' (I used scare quotes!) doesn't give people the right to make assumptions about you. After all, the advertising might not be accurate.

As of April 2002, the case was on its way to trial, and a local newspaper published an update with a demoralizing overview of the course of the typical lawsuit. The next month a settlement was announced. According to David Noll, an attorney for Berry, she could go to a local car dealership and ``pick out whatever type of Toyota she wants.'' Full details were not released, which is not unusual. What is unusual is that any details were released; a sweeping confidentiality agreement is a standard part of out-of-court settlements. Noll said he thought it was ``a recognition of the fact that there's been such an amazing amount of attention focused on this case.... There's not a whole lot of reason to try to hide its existence.'' Here's a legal analysis of the case by Keith A. Rowley, published in the NLJ.

Yeah, yeah -- a Yoda is not a Hutt.

This webpage has a review by ``Yoda'' of some aftermarket products for Toyotas. The Toyota Company was founded by Kiichiro Toyoda. Akio Toyoda, his grandson, became the youngest member of Toyota's board of directors in Summer 2000 (age 43 or so). The Sakichi Toyoda Memorial House is a part of the Toyota Automobile Museum. The Toyoda Model AA was Toyota's first vehicle. It was a stylish vehicle, but it was designed for city driving and didn't have a bra. Anyway, AA is a small bra size, certainly not appropriate for hooters.

If you want more (alleged) instances of someone named J. Blair who commits a fraud and then laughs over the discovery of his triumph, here's something from the Jayson Blair interview mentioned at the CSPI entry. Blair had described the home of rescued POW Pvt. Jessica Lynch as overlooking ``tobacco fields and cattle pastures.'' As a New York Times self-investigation reported, though he filed with a Palestine, W.Va. dateline, Blair never visited. Blair is quoted in the Observer interview:

``That's my favorite, just because the description was so far off from the reality. And the way they described it in The Times story -- someone read a portion of it to me -- I couldn't stop laughing.'

JAC

Japan Assessment Center.

JAC

Journal of Ancient Civilizations. Published annually since about 1985 by the Institute for the History of Ancient Civilizations (Northeast Normal University, Changchun, Jilin province, The People's Republic of China). JAC is the only academic journal in the People's Republic which specializes in the ancient cultures of the Mediterranean area and the Near East.

jacana

A bird that can be found wading in the shallow waters along the shores of the Scrabble tablelands.

JACC

Joyce ACC.

jackeroo

Just an inexperienced ranch hand, learning his trade in some rural corner of the Scrabble tablelands. Sounds like he might be named after the jackalope. Cf. jackleg.

jackhammer

One of the more effective tools for removing soapy build-up on shower stalls. Also effective in removing shower stalls. Visit the hard water entry.

Jackie O.

Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis. See this Ari entry.

jack-knife

A semi tractor-trailer rig is said to jack-knife when the tractor rig turns too sharply, and the inertia of the forward-moving trailer turns the trailer around so the tractor and trailer make an acute angle. This is not a good thing to have happen.

jackleg

An unskilled worker, earning the minimum wage as a day laborer, or maybe collecting firewood in the Scrabble forest.

This fellow Jack has a pretty bad rep -- master of none and all that. Cf. jackeroo.

Jackson

J. D. Jackson's classic Classical Electrodynamics.

JACM

Journal of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). ``[P]rovides coverage of the most significant work going on in computer science, broadly construed. It is a peer-reviewed journal, published six times a year by ACM.''

JACMP

Journal of Applied Clinical Medical Physics. Published by the American College of Medical Physics (ACMP).

JACS

Journal of The American Chemical Society (ACS). LC call number QD1.J826.

JACT

Joint Association of Classical Teachers (of the UK). Publishes classics textbooks. Their Greek primer, at least, is weak on grammar. JACT offices keep a file of Latin and Greek tutors available by region.

jaculate

A synonym of the verb throw. For reasons that I can only guess at, this word is not at all common outside the dialects of the Scrabble tablelands.

JADR

Japanese Association of Dental Research.

JAFER

Java Access For Electronic Resources. Intended to be an easy-to-use ``visual toolkit to protect those building portals and information sources from the intricate technical details of the protocols involved [especially Z39.50], and allow them to concentrate on the actual content.'' An Oxford University LAS project funded under the DNER development program of JISC.

JAG

Judge Advocate General. Part of the US military justice system and a popular television series. It stars a Canadian, David James Elliott, born in Toronto. I don't think this qualifies as Canadian content, though.

JAH

Journal of American History. Published quarterly (June, September, December, March) by the Organization of American Historians. Most of the contributions and roughly half of the pages are book reviews.

The journal was formerly originally published as The Mississippi Valley Historical Review [Vol. 1, no. 1 (June 1914)-v. 50, no. 4 (March 1964)]. The volume numbering was continued (not restarted) through the name change.

Jahrestag

German: `anniversary.'

Jahrestagung

German: `annual meeting, annual convention.'

Jahrh.

Abbreviation of German Jahrhundert, `century.'

JAIPCC

Joint Applications in Instrumentation Process and Computer Control.

ja ja

Spanish onomatopoeia with the same sense and about the same pronunciation as English `ha ha.' Cf. jua jua.

JAL

Japan Air Lines. Pronounced `Jal' to rhyme with `Hal.'

JALN

Journal of the Asynchronous Learning Networks. A publication of the Sloan Consortium (``Sloan-C''). I have a hunch that it's about ALN, but all the articles seem to be about online learning.

JALT

Japanese Association for Language Teaching. Mostly teaching English.

JAM

Jamaat al Muslimeen.

JAM

US Army slang acronym for Jaysh al Mahdi, the Iraqi Shi'ite militia of Moqtada al Sadr, which is typically described in news reports as the Mahdi Army. The words radical, Shia, and militia may be sprinkled in as well.

JAMA

Japan Automobile Manufacturers Association. See also JAMA's Tokyo website (in English).

Pointless detail:
A column by George F. Will in the Washington Post (``What Ails GM,'' May 1, 2005) ends with the following:

Full, and pointless, disclosure: Mrs. Will is a consultant to the Japan Automobile Manufacturers Association. She drives a Cadillac.

JAMA

Journal of the American Medical Association (AMA). The official name of journal is now just JAMA, pronounced ``JAM-uh.'' Try the old URL if the new one doesn't work.

jama

The second part of that timeless phrase, ``rama-jama.''

jamás

Spanish, `never.' Sounds like ``Hamas'' in English.

JAMIE

Joint Analogue Microelectronics Initiative of Europe. Cf. jammie.

JAMIT

JApanese Society of Medical Imaging Technology. Really, why didn't they just translate it as Japanese Association...?

jammie

Cutsy-ese for pyjama or pajama, a word of Hindi origin.

jammy

Having to do with jam or jams.

JAMP

Joint Automated Mapping Project.

jam sandwich

Mnemonics for the order of planets (in order of average distance to the sun [Ftnt. 28]) are typically sentences about jam sandwiches (Jupiter Saturn). E.g.:

Mother very thoughtfully made a jam sandwich under no protest.

``[T]houghtfully'' here stands for Terrarium, the Latin name for the Earth. Another example of the use of this word is in the famous encyclical letter issued by Pope John XXIII, entitled Pacem In Terrarium, which urged all animals living in a confined space with limited resources to please calm down. Something like that, anyway.

I was going to mention that the pope issued a papal encyclical, but it seems that's the only kind he issues, and he seems to have a monopoly on the practice, at least for the last few centuries (c.).

Another:

Most volcanoes erupt mouldy jam sandwich under normal pressure.

There is a certain balancing act in this glossary -- in order to create a certain level of amusement, I find it useful, even necessary, to introduce certain ... inaccuracies ... into the definitions. On the other hand, in order to preserve the fiction of utility of this ``resource'' (hah!) it is somewhat desirable that the inaccuracies so introduced be of a blatant, easily identified sort. This entry contains an inaccuracy that does not satisfy this last criterion. For the benefit of some (idiots) I must note explicitly that the Latin for Earth is Terra (nominative case) and that the Pope's encyclical letter, of April 11, 1963, was entitled Pacem in Terris. It is available in English as publication No. 342-6 (ISBN 1-55586-342-6) from the Office for Publishing and Promotion Services, United States Catholic Conference, Washington, DC. I was going to write ``Washington, DC, zip code unknown,'' but I thought better of it. Someone would probably write out ``zip code unknown'' as part of the address.

JAMSTEC

JApanese Marine Science and TEchnology Center.

Jan

A given name or two or three.

As a man's given name, Jan is common in Holland. That name is pronounced roughly like the English word yon, but with a vowel of shorter duration (say half that of the ah sound in the English word).

Jan has been a common nickname for Janice, pronounced like the first syllable of the longer name. I imagine you knew that, so I'm not going to do a long song and dance explaining the pronunciation, etc., blah, blah, blah, and so forth. That would just be wasting your time.

William Jan Berry was half of the surfer-rock duo Jan and Dean. You can learn a lot about them on the web, much of it true, and much more than I care to repeat. I will mention that Jan Berry graduated UCLA in 1964 and enrolled in California Medical College, because that gives me a chance to link to two (2) other moderately meaty entries in the glossary, see?

There's an official Jan-and-Dean site; as I write this in May 2004, it doesn't yet mention that Jan died late last March, age 62. My condolences to his life-long musical collaborator Dean O. Torrence. Their official site was evidently designed by Dean, who got a BFA (1964) from USC. It is one of the most asinine sites on the web. From the slow-loading start page, you click to a kiosk window of fixed dimensions and no normal controls. Most of the text content is served as heavy graphics (which are also hard to keep up to date). The British Library won awards for doing this in its Turning the Pages project. But sometimes what works for the Diamond Sutra or the Luttrell Psalter does not work so well for Immortal Mispellings of And Dean. To save yourself some grief, click to index2 instead. Better yet, just read the excerpt below, which contains all you need to know. The biography section on the site (written by Dean) begins

Jan Berry and I both attended University High School in West Los Angeles, California. We met while playing for the University High School Football Team "The Warriors". Jan played tight end and I played wide receiver on offense and free safety on defense. Did you ever read that before?........ didn't think so. Our coach, Milton "Uncle Milty" Anisman who later when asked about what it was like to have Jan and Dean on his football team, he said who? gee I don't remember having a girl on any of my football teams.

After practice, a bunch of us teammates would all get together and harmonize some of the hit platters of the day while taking a shower. ...

Jan and Dean had their first hit as a duo in 1959. The surfer thing came a little later. They were very successful and bought cool new cars. On April 12, 1966, Jan drove his new Stingray into the back of a parked truck (at a high rate of speed). When he regained consciousness a few weeks later, he couldn't walk or talk. Dean put his degree to use, founding Kittyhawk Graphics. Jan presumably put some of his medical training to use over a decade of rehab. After CBS aired the television movie ``Deadman's Curve'' (1978) based on their story, they started touring and recording again. As everyone used to say, Jan could sing again pretty well ``considering.'' It's inspiring and very interesting for, uh, die-hard fans, I'm sure. Oh yeah -- Jan got into drugs and derailed the comeback, and Dean teamed up with Mike Love of the Beach Boys for some commercial gigs as Mike and Dean. Dennis Wilson had a fatal diving accident before he could get himself cleaned up, but Jan graduated from rehab, and Jan and Dean spent the next couple of decades on the nostalgia circuit.

JAN

Japanese Adopted Name. Official Japanese generic drug name.

JAN

Joint (J) Army-Navy (military standard).

Jane E.

Women whose first name is Jane seem to have about a fifty percent chance of having a middle name beginning in E. Often the E stands for Emily or Elizabeth, but more research is needed.

Janean

Read on.

Janeite

A Jane Austen enthusiast. The word Janean is also used, though primarily as an adjective. Austenian, now much rarer, seems to have been more common in the past. FWIW, in 1927 the TLS recommended a new edition of JEAL's Memoir (for editor Robert Chapman's enumeration of JA's letters and manuscripts) as ``mak[ing] it necessary to the complete Austenian....''

JANES

Journal of the Ancient Near Eastern Society.

Jane's Fighting Ships

Nowadays it's Jane's Information Group, Ltd., and it comprises

• a Defense Weekly (JDW),
• a Foreign Report (JFR),
• an Intelligence Digest (JID),
• an Intelligence Review (JIR -- they can't use that: it belongs to JIR!),
• a Navy International (JNI -- oh, they do ships?),
• a Strategic Weapons Systems [...report, I believe] (JSWS),
• a Terrorism and Insurgency Center (JTIC),
• a Terrorism and Security Monitor (JTSM -- milkin' it eh?), and
• a World Railways (JWR),

that I am aware of, anyway.

JANET

Joint Academic NETwork (U.K.). (An alternative/equivalent address: <http://www.ja.net/>. See also <http://www.ukerna.ac.uk/>) You might have this confused with JUNET.

JAnthArch

Journal of Anthropological Archaeology. Catalogued by TOCS-IN.

Janus

An ancient-mythical Roman god with two faces (also for that reason known as Bifrons). The god of beginnings, or gates or other entries, and the fellow after whom the month of January is named. Janus was unusual among the gods venerated by the Romans: an old Italic god, he had no counterpart in the Greek pantheon.

I knew that, but for some reason a Greek restaurant opened in Buffalo and took Janus as its name, and that threw me off. In order to avoid making a similar mistake, you want to review this information at the Bijani subentry.

JANUS

Joint (J) Army-Navy Uniform Simulation.

JAOC

Joint (J) Air Operations Center. DOD term.

JAOS

Journal of the American Oriental Society. Catalogued by TOCS-IN. I have a hunch it's related to the American Oriental Society (AOS).

JAP

Journal of Applied Physics. The associated letters journal is APL.

JAPA

Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association.

JARCE

Journal of the American Research Center in Egypt. Catalogued by TOCS-IN.

JArchSc

Journal of Archaeological Science. Catalogued by TOCS-IN.

jarrah

An evergreen tree that grows in the Scrabble forest.

Jarritos

A Mexican brand of sodas, and the only such widely available in the US. The word jarritos means `little jars' where I come from (Argentina), and little bottles are ``botellitas.'' I'll have to check with my Mexican ``informants,'' as we linguistic anthropologists call them, to find out how jarritos is construed in Mexico.

Okay, back from research. It turns out that yes, it has the same meaning in Mexican Spanish, and there are even some other people who have noticed the oddity of the name and are bothered by it.

I've only ever seen Jarritos in fruit flavors, but one informant informs me that they sell a nonalcoholic sangría-flavored soda. That's one of the exciting things about field work: the unexpected insights! I neglected to ask if he's ever seen any diet sodas from Jarritos.

JARS

Java Applet Rating Service.

Jas.

James.

JAS

Jane Austen Society. See also the Australian and North American Societies.

JASA

Jane Austen Society of Australia. See also the North American and British Societies.

We now return you to your regularly scheduled glossary entry.

JASIS

Journal of the American Society for Information Science. Published by ASIS.

JASNA

Jane Austen Society of North America. See also the British and Australian Societies.

If you want some real resources, however, instead of club dues information, try the Jane Austen Info Page.

JAST

Journal of American Studies of Turkey. ISSN 1300-6606. ``A print and on-line publication of the American Studies Association of Turkey (ASAT), the Journal of American Studies of Turkey publishes work in English by scholars of any nationality on American literature, history, art, music, film, popular culture, institutions, politics, economics, geography and related subjects.''

JATO

Jet-Assisted Take-Off. More at the RATO entry.

JATR

Not a journal. The initials of J.A.T. Robinson, an HJ researcher who wanted to believe that the gospels were all written before the destruction of the second temple in 70 CE. He argued that an event of that magnitude would surely have gotten bigger play in the gospels, at a time when Christianity and Judaism were not completely resolved as distinct religions, if it had occurred before these were written. It's hard to credit this, since some, at least, of the Christian scriptures were written after the destruction and none mention it explicitly.

Usually, GMark 13 is taken as referring to the second Temple destruction; this is taken as one of the most important among the few guides, none very reliable, for dating the Christian scriptures.

JATS

Japanese Association for Toothfriendly Sweets. See also the heavy in the good-cop/bad-cop routine: JADR (Dental Research). There's an international umbrella organization for tooth-friendly sweets: TSI.

JAVA

Japanese Anti-Vivisection Association.

Java

Object-oriented (OO) programming language and environment. Originally called Oak. Omar Patiño maintained a Virtual Library (W3VL) page for Java that appears to have expired. This page allows you to suffer Java in French.

Try the Digital Cats' Java Resource Center. They probably already have something like this animation utility.

The following paragraph is what I thought back in 1996 or so, after writing my first long Java program. These thoughts are now more than a decade out of date, but I don't have any new ones. (Either that or I'm older, and less disposed to credit my own opinions.)

On the whole, although all its compilers are pre-beta-level buggy, and it displays security-inspired obstacles at every turn, handles strings obscenely clumsily, handles complex numbers not at all, makes most easy things strenuous, is not at all platform-independent as advertised, and though its design incorporates more really bone-headed choices than there is space in this vast glossary to describe, and even though object-orientedness is mostly hype, and even though C++ sucks but is much better, after all Java cannot be said, in the strictest sense of the word, to be utterly evil, probably. It should find utility as the ultimate punishment in countries that permit torture. In a country whose main export commodity was once coffee, but is now white, how appropriate to make Java fit the crime. Traffickers will beg for extradition to the US, where the highest punishment is merely capital.

For a taste of Java, try Michael Neumann's extensive list of sample short programs in different programming languages. As of now, it has five Java programs.

JavaScript

You can find out a lot about JavaScript on the web. Locally, we serve a short page about JavaScript comments and browser compatibility.

Michael Neumann's extensive list of sample short programs in different programming languages includes three JavaScript programs.

jaw-dropping

Awesome.

Here's something from Public Speaking and Influencing Men in Business (from the 54th printing, 1957) by the influential Dale Carnegie (author of How to Win Friends and Influence People). On page 227, Review Exercise.

1. Surrender your jaw, let it fall like a dead weight from your head. Take in a deep breath, feel as if you were sucking the air down into your stomach, and chant ``ah'' with ease, without one tiny trace of effort.

Why didn't he do any books on yoga? He was a natural!

JAWS

Journal of Ancient War Studies. Earlier proposal for a new journal. Now AMW (Ancient and Medieval Warfare) is being considered.

JAXA

Japan Aerospace EXploration Agency.

Jaycees

Name derived from original initialism: JC for Junior Chamber (of Commerce).

Jazz

Buffalo was a big Jazz venue once, but few if any of the greats are from here. Even New York City was not the birthplace of too many. A Stammtisch investigation lends strong statistical support to the hypothesis that Pittsburgh and other Pennsylvania cities have been the birthplaces of Jazz greats. The Chicago era was nourished by local talent, Detroit, etc. John Coltrane was from Philadelphia.

I couldn't think of anything less relevant to write about Jazz. What did you expect, I should explain soul and tell you where to get some?

Oh, I thought of something else: if you want to be simultaneously pretentious and multi-culti, Jazz is the ticket.

J.-B.

Jean-Baptiste. French name meaning `John the Baptist' (Jo. Bapt.). I was going to write that it's a common name in French, but I remember when I told Sabine about a woman I met named Bernadette (I think that was it) and she laughed because it was such an old-fashioned name. Of course, I thought it was pretty remarkable that someone could be named Sabine and survive childhood without major psychological scars, but if this glossary ever becomes popular reading I'm probably going to catch hell for that remark, so I really should edit this bit out, instead of repeating it in the Jennifer Jones entry.

Being beautiful has psychic benefits. Sabine suffered no apparent psychological trauma on account of her name.

JB

Jurum Baccalaureus. `Bachelor of Laws.'

JBap

John the BAPtist. This is the guy who lost his mind, isn't it?

JbbPrBrG

Jahrbücher für preußisch-brandenburgische Geschichte. A German journal that might have been named `Yearbooks of Prussian-Brandenburg History' in English. Notice the letter-doubling (bb) to indicate plural (Bücher, `books,' instead of Buch, `book'). See Stuart Jenks's page of Tables of Contents of Historical Journals and Monographic Series in German for a partial table of contents (deutsche Seite: Zeitschriftenfreihandmagazin Inhaltsverzeichnisse geschichtswissenschaftlicher Zeitschriften in deutscher Sprache).

JBC

Journal of Biological Chemistry.

JBL

Journal of Biblical Literature. Catalogued by TOCS-IN.

JBS

Jamaica Bureau of Standards. The JBS has a range of laboratories for standards development and testing in textiles, paints, microbiology, chemicals, food, metallurgy, paper, furniture and packaging.

You call this ganja, mon? Weak! We put you in jail fa dis.

JBS

Journal of Biblical Studies. ``[A]n electronic journal dedicated to the field of Biblical Studies in general. Articles on any aspect of Biblical Studies (including: archaeology, linguistics, exegesis, history, and textual issues) are welcome, and contributions that challenge the traditional boundaries of Biblical Studies are encouraged. We would also like to see articles that discuss the relationship between Biblical Studies and other disciplines.''

JBSP

Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology. And existentialism. Throw some onions in the soup too -- that usually improves the flavor. From the ``NOTES FOR CONTRIBUTORS'':

The JBSP publishes papers on phenomenology and existential philosophy as well as contributions from other fields of philosophy. Papers from workers in the humanities and the human sciences interested in the philosophy of their subject will be welcome too. Space will be given to research in progress, to book reviews, and to bibliographies of use to students. The journal will also provide a forum for interdisciplinary discussion.

JBSP was founded in 1970 by the late Wolfe Mays. A subscription to JBSP is included in the price of membership in the BSP. JBSP is published in three issues per year -- January, May, and October. [Unlike some such journals, they really seem to mean it: I received announcements of the January and May 2006 issues (vol. 37, Nos. 1 and 2) in January and May, respectively, of 2006.]

JBY

Jewish believers in Yeshua. Christian proselytizers among Jews like this term, evidently because it emphasizes the Jewish origin of Jesus. Yeshua is the original Hebrew or Aramic name that we translate Jesus. (For more on this, see the His entry.)

JBY

Just Be Yourself.

JC

Jakob-Creutzfeldt. A nasty virus which infects oligodendrocytes in the brain. Oligodendrocytes wrap around nerve processes and produce myelin, a fatty substance that provides electrical insulation. As this tissue is destroyed, neurological dysfunction follows. Kidneys harbor inactive JC virus in healthy individuals. When immune response is suppressed by HIV, JC virus migrates in some way to the bone marrow, from which it makes its way to the brain within B lymphocytes. This virus does not cause Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (CJD, q.v.).

JC

See Jaycees.

JC

Jean Chrétien. An answer to a trivia question in the US: name a recent PM of Canada.

If you can't remember, you might get away with ``Jay Cee -- uhh....'' It's been a popular pair of initials for Canadian PM's. An interesting borderline case is John Turner. After serving in a few Liberal governments, in 1975 he resigned in protest from a Pierre Trudeau government and went to work in the private sector. He returned to full-time politics in 1984 when Pierre Trudeau retired. That June he defeated Jean Chrétien (remember him?) to be elected leader of the Liberal Party, and so became PM. How did he defeat Jean Chrétien? Well, a number of unsatisfactory theories have been proposed, but I think the name is key. Even though he was apparently born John Napier Turner (in Sussex, England), he was also known as John Christopher Turner. That doubtless provided the margin of victory.

You could hardly believe it, but in just a few short months, Turner was engulfed in scandal, and the next September he was replaced as PM by Progressive Conservative Party leader Brian Mulroney. (So Turner was PM ``1984-1984.'' Parliamentary systems have their lighter side.) It should have been obvious that Mulroney's successor in June 1993, Kim Campbell, had to use the nickname Jane when she faced Jean Chrétien the following November. She was PM ``1993-1993.''

What we see here is that a partial JC is able to defeat a full JC, and a BM can defeat a partial JC. Probably a BM wouldn't stand a chance against a full JC. (Oh of course, Trudeau defeated Joe Clark. Get real.) With Paul Martin, it seems the Grits are experimenting with PM for PM (it might explain BM). Hmmm. After less than a year, it doesn't seem to be working out very well.

JC, J.C.

Jesus Christ. In the same way that (okay not really in the same way that) J.R. have been popular initials in the US lately, it seems that around the first century BCE (if only you knew it), if you wanted to be an important personage J.C. were the initials to have.

Jesus is essentially the Latin transliteration of the Greek name Iêsoûs. (The circumflex on the e is to indicate that it's a Greek letter eta; the second circumflex is just a circumflex accent. Sorry. For what it's worth, accents weren't indicated graphically in Greek until centuries later.) The Greek name, in turn, comes from the Aramaic name Yeshua used among Jews (and which therefore may be regarded as a Hebrew name of that time). That name, in turn, is a version of the older Hebrew name, in use to this day, Y'hoshua. This is normally rendered as Joshua in English. Interestingly, coincidentally, suspiciously, providentially, or significantly, depending on your POV, Joshua means something along the lines of `[the Lord] saves.' The first famous Joshua, of course, was the son of Nun, and that makes a good pun (pone?) in English, when you consider that Mary was a virgin when she was inseminated or whatever by a holy ghost, so she was as celibate as a nun. Nancy Freedman had some fun with Joshua, Son of None, which she used as the title of a 1973 novel. In her book, some cells are saved from the dying JFK and cloned. The resulting child is named Joshua. The idolatry surrounding that guy is astounding.

From Hellenistic times, Greek (more precisely Koine) had been the widely used lingua franca of the eastern Mediterranean from Egypt to Greece. The Greek name Iesus (the borrowed version of Joshua, remember?) was adopted into Latin (as a fourth-declension noun, I'm sure you wanted to know). In the usual way, consonantal I came to be written J after that letter was invented, and pronounced as a voiced fricative in English. While there are many versions of Latin pronunciation, Church Latin coincides with (our reconstruction of) Classical Latin for this name, pronounced YEH-soos (the oo is the oo of Sue; for vowel quantities you're on your own).

Christ means messiah. The English word messiah is derived from the Hebrew word meshiah (or maybe the Aramaic, I'll check details later). The Semitic word means `annointed [person],' a term with an interesting Biblical history. The word was readily translated into the Greek christos, etymon of the English word Christ.

JC

Gaius Julius Caesar. This and other Classical Latin names explained at the tria nomina entry.

JCAHO

Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations.

JCANT

Journal of CANnabis Therapeutics. Published by Haworth Press starting in 2001, it went up in smoke at the beginning of 2004.

These days, when you publish an article in a Haworth Press journal, along with your offprints they send you a little packet of chochkes to help you promote their journals. These include a notepad and a ballpoint pen with their URL on it and ... a foil-wrapped chocolate medallion imprinted with their logo. The chocolate is something new; maybe if they'd started providing munchies earlier, JCANT jmightve.

JCB

``Joseph Cyril Bamford launched the construction and agricultural equipment manufacturing company that bears his initials, in 1945.'' The company is also in materials handling equipment these days, but in the UK the initialism has come to be used as an antonomasia for backhoe-equipped digger, which the company pioneered.

On page 10 of Harm Done, an Inspector Wexford Mystery by Ruth Rendell, the inspector is driving his grandsons to school. One of them expresses his pleasure about some road-building work. ``I liked the diggers. I'm going to drive a JCB when I'm grown up and then I'll dig up the whole world.''

Boys, as Ruth Rendell has observed through Wexford's thoughts, take longer to reach an age where they are able to appreciate pretty landscapes. (Wexford is a wuss.) Incidentally, this novel is not recommended. At various points the writing is confusing, possibly for effect, but the immediate effects are confusion and irritation. Also, it is drearily obsessed with what bad people men are to women. (Only some men! Don't want to appear insensitively sensitive. And not any more often than once every page or so.) As you can imagine, correctly, the book is almost excruciatingly politically correct. Of course, for the sort of people who like to read that sort of book, this is the sort of book they would like to read. To help you decide if that's you, here is some of Inspector Wexford's thought from page 4:

    If she had been, well, a different sort of girl, Wexford wouldn't have paid so much attention. If she had been more like her friends. He hesitated about the phrase he used even in his own mind, for he liked to keep to his personal brand of political correctness in his thoughts as well as his speech. Not to be absurd about it, not to use ridiculous expressions like intellectually challenged, but not to be insensitive either and call a girl such as Lizzie Cromwell mentally handicapped or retarded. ...

Stupid. That will do.

JCC

Jewish Community Center.

JCC

Job Control Command.

JCCC

Joint (J) Communications Control Center. DOD term.

JCCD

Junction Charge-Coupled Devices. Whereas ordinary charge-coupled devices (CCD) use MOS capacitors (MOS-C), JCCD's use the capacitance of a reverse-biased pn junction.

JCE

Journal of Chemical Education. LC number QD1.J825.

JCG

Journal of Crystal Growth. LC number QD921.J6.

JcG

Just Classical Guitar. An old site that now forwards immediately to a ``Classical Guitar Internet Resource Site!'' with a focus on the greater (I don't know how much greater) Savannah area. We also have a bare-bones CG (classical guitar) entry.

JCIC

Japan Center for Intercultural Communications.

JCL

Job Control Language. Probably IBM JCL, operating system for a mainframe.

JCL

Junior Classical League. A conspiracy to promote Latin, classical Greek, and other dusty classical learning among impressionable youth (US and Canadian high school students). A membership organization for unwitting US and Canadian high school students, manipulated (``sponsored'') behind the scenes (as we reveal here on your computer screen for the first time) by the American Classical League (ACL). Longer alternate name is National Junior Classical League (NJCL). If a distinction is made between the terms JCL and NJCL, it seems to be that students belong to the NJCL and student chapters in a high school belong to the JCL. Five students who've studied a classical subject with a teacher suffice to form a chapter.

The JCL cosponsors competitive national exams with the ACL -- in Latin (NLE), Classical Greek (NGE) and mythology -- but they still don't get to look at the answers beforehand.

JCLers who experience separation anxiety when they graduate high school can join the SCL.

JCMEC

Joint (J) Captured Materiel Exploitation Center.

JCMOS

Joint Complementary Metal Oxide Semiconductor (CMOS) logic. Another name for JMOS (q.v.).

JCMS

Journal of Crystal and Molecular Structure. LC number QD901.J62 . Volume 1 in 1971, volume 11 in 1981; continued as JCSR.

JCN

Japan Corporate News. See JCNN. Newswire.

JCN

Jewish Communication Network.

JCNN

Japan Corporate News Network. In principle, JCN Newswire (as opposed to JCN Network) carries company press releases and JCNN carries business news, but it's hard to see the distinction in practice.

JCO

Journal of Clinical Oncology. ASCO's peer reviewed journal.

JCP

Japanese Communist Party. In a new platform adopted at the end of a party convention on January 17, 2004, the JCP toned down its revolution rhetoric and accepted the emperor system as something temporarily acceptable. I thought that was worth a chuckle.

JCPC

Judicial Committee of the Privy Council. We don't explain ``Privy Council'' at its abbreviation PC either. Who knows what we might find if we looked?

JCS

Job Control Statement.

JCS

Joint Chiefs of Staff. At one time this was the body through which the separate activities of the four US military services were coordinated. Since the Goldwater-Nichols DOD Reorganization Act of 1986, its role is firmly advisory. This law resolved an ambiguous situation that had been evolving since WWII, when the the JCS exercised direct executive authority. The National Security Act of 1947 treated the JCS as a planning and advisory group, but its members had continued to exercise executive power in their separate roles as chiefs of military services. Since 1986, their status as military advisors -- i.e., as members of the JCS, takes precedence over their other duties to the exclusion of an executive role specifically in the direction of combatant forces (though not in other management tasks).

You can read some relevant history, oddly enough, at the LSJ entry. What, I don't mention Napoleon or the Prussian innovations? This is pretty incomplete.

JCS

Journal of Cuneiform Studies. An annual publication of the American Schools of Oriental Research. See AASOR for other publications.

JCSR

Journal of College Student Retention: Research, Theory & Practice. Published by CSCSR, it ``is a scholarly refereed quarterly journal. The volume year publication date is October (1), January (2), April (3), July (4). Subscription is for a volume year.'' Quoting from the same informative page (text harvested September 2004):

NEED FOR THIS JOURNAL

Current U.S. retention figures have not improved over time, even with large amounts of money expended by colleges and universities on programs and services to retain students. In spite of these programs and services, retention figures have not improved. [Why does the content of this sentence sound familiar?] In fact, only about 66% of high school graduates attend college and about 50% of those who attend college earn a bachelor degrees. [Sic. I just cut and paste, okay?] Put in real numbers [is that with the natural topology?], about 2,800,000 students will graduate from high school this year, 1,850,000 will attend college and only 925,000 of these students will earn a bachelor [sic; it's not some funny font glitch, afaik] degree. Colleges are looking for ways to keep the students that they recruit. The Journal will provide the educational community with current theoretical foundations, research and practice results, which will help educators and institutions to retain students.

Let me add a note here, since there is something not mentioned that needs to be explained. The fact that ``retention figures have not improved over time'' despite ``large amounts of money expended'' on ``programs and services'' does not reflect poorly on the trained professionals who run the programs and provide the services.

Based on Department of Education statistics, I think ``college'' in the quoted text excludes junior colleges. Roughly half as many associate's degrees are granted per year as bachelor's degrees. Most AA's are awarded by junior colleges, and about one third of these are university-parallel or general humanities degrees, designed to allow immediate transfer into the junior year of a four-year college. The remaining two thirds are business, technical, professional associate degrees and the like, for students planning to work immediately afterwards.

The abbreviation JCSR isn't all that common, which might be just as well. An alternative short form is Retention Journal.

JCSR

Journal of Crystallographic and Spectroscopic Research. LC number QD901.J62 . Volume 12 in 1982; continues JCMS, which reached vol. 11 in 1981.

JCSR

JISC Committee for the Support of Research. (That's the UK

JISC.)

Jct.

JunCTion. In place names, it typically refers to rail spurs. Like Princeton Jct. (See NJT entry.)

JCV

JC Virus.

JCW

Juggalo Championship Wrestling. Misspelled here. The correct spelling makes the hilarious substitution of a letter t in place of the p. We realized that you couldn't stand so much intense and bloody cleverness. A product of ICP.

JD

Jack Daniels. This guy advertises in Scientific American (SciAm). Too hoity-toity. That must be the reason why George Thorogood [unofficial page of rated links; excellent page from Finland, including lyrics; weak official page] doesn't drink with him when he drinks alone, with nobody else.

(His web site seems to have passed out of existence.)

JD

Julian Day. A chronological system apparently invented by the astronomer John F. Herschel, and based on counting days and fractions of days from the first day of the Julian period.

In Herschel's original scheme, dating begins at noon (at the Greenwich meridian) in order that an entire night of observing (at least for Herschel and his European colleagues) occurred on a Julian day.

For Western historians, counting the beginning of a day from noon is inconvenient. Hence historians came to define Julian days that began at midnight. Historians also use the abbreviation JD, but the scheme is distinguished by calling its days ``chronological Julian days,'' as opposed to ``astronomical Julian days.'' As you can imagine, in practice one rarely sees these terms except in explanations of the difference.

To be precise, I should say that chronological Julian days begin at midnight twelve hours before the start of the corresponding astronomical Julian day. Most discussions of Julian days are phrased with the implicit understanding that the twelve hours before the first (astronomical) day of the Julian period are already in the first Julian day. That is, people implicitly think in terms of a day that begins before noon. Surprise.

In the neverending search for convenience and saving two keystrokes, historians have also defined an MJD.

Peter Meyer has a clear exposition of the various Julian Day numbers.

J.D.

Juris Doctor. Latin, `Doctor of Law[s].' This is a rebranding of what used to be known in the US as the LL.B., the basic law degree. I suppose the name change was justified as reflecting the progressive professionalization of legal practice. People who have been awarded the J.D. traditionally are considered entitled to append ``Esq.'' after their names, but using ``Dr.'' as a title is too brazen for most. On personals websites lawyers generally select ``doctorate'' as their highest level of education completed, but this is perfectly acceptable because personals are supposed to be deceptive.

JDA

Joint Duty Assignment. Can be multi-Service, joint or multinational. I'm not going to speculate on the distinction between multi-Service and joint. Maybe this means ``multiservice -- joint or multinational --.''

JDAL

Joint Duty Assignment List.

JDAM

Joint (services) Direct-Attack Munitions.

Marshall McLuhan is credited with this prediction (and rather a lot of others): ``World War III will be a guerrilla information war, with no division between military and civilian participation.''

JDBC

Java DataBase Connection.

JDC

Joint Declaration on Cooperation.

JDC

Joint Distribution Committee. A Jewish Relief organization.

JDEC

Joint Document Exploitation Center. Just like JCMEC.

JDF

Juvenile Diabetes Foundation International. See the main diabetes entry DM.

JDISS

Joint (J) Deployable Intelligence Support System. ``A transportable workstation and communications suite that electronically extends a joint intelligence center to a joint task force or other tactical user.'' In DOD usage, as far as I know, information about the enemy is the only meaning of the word intelligence.

JDK

Java Development Kit.

JDL

Jewish Defense League.

J. D. Salinger

Jerome David Salinger. Known as Jerry. But really, you shouldn't ask. He doesn't like personal questions like that.

JDW

Jane's Defense Weekly. They've really leveraged the name recognition. Now JDW is part of Jane's Information Group. For a list, see our entry for Jane's Fighting Ships.

JEA

Journal of Egyptian Archaeology. Catalogued by TOCS-IN.

JEA

Journal of Experimental Algorithmics. Published by the ACM.

ISSN 1084-6654.

JEAL

James Edward Austen-Leigh, born 1798, died 1874. Nephew and important biographer of Jane Austen. He was the eldest son of James Austen, Jane Austen's eldest brother. The Austen family tree had a lot of rather leafy branches, and they tended to overuse some names. Within the family, JEAL was called Edward.

The mother of Jane and James Austen was born Cassandra Leigh (1739-1827). Her brother James Leigh (1735-1817) changed his name to James Leigh Perrot in 1751 in order to inherit the estate of his maternal great-uncle Thomas Perrot. When Mrs. Leigh Perrot died in 1836, JEAL inherited Scarlets (the Leigh Perrots' Berkshire estate) on the condition that he add the name Leigh to his own. This stuff happened repeatedly. For example, JEAL was originally named after his uncle Edward Austen (1767-1852). However, uncle Edward had been adopted in childhood by his cousin Mr. Knight, and became Edward Knight in 1812. A rose by some other name may smell a lot sweeter with a comfortable legacy. (And on the subject of clichés, see about Bulwer Lytton's name at the entry for ``It was a dark and stormy night.'')

I haven't seen specific instructions on the pronunciation of the Leigh surname. However, a celebrated cousin, Dr. Theophilus Leigh, was master of Balliol College, Oxford for over fifty years. (When elected, he'd been expected to be just a temporary placeholder, as he was thought to be in poor health. He lived to be over 90.) In a letter to Dr. Samuel Johnson, local resident Mrs. Thrale wrote his name as ``Dr. Lee,'' so there's a clue.

Jane Austen died on July 18, 1817. Jane Austen's last surviving sibling, Admiral Sir Francis Austen, died in August 1865 at the age of 91. With a consciousness that the last of those who had any personal memory of Jane Austen would soon be passing away, and with some concern about what distant family or non-family might write about her, the family decided that a biographical memoir of Jane Austen should be prepared.

As a schoolboy, JEAL had once -- with Aunt Jane's encouragement -- begun to write a novel, though he never finished it. Late in life, he had published Recollections of the Vine Hunt (1865), and this success probably encouraged him in his efforts toward a biography. As the only son of JA's eldest sibling (this is sounding a little like a mafia story, isn't it?), JEAL took the task as his duty. His A Memoir of Jane Austen was based on his own and two of his sisters' recollections (his sister Caroline and his half-sister Anne), as well as those of some cousins. There were also a few relatives alive who for various reasons did not cooperate, and one consequence of this was that JEAL did not have access to all of JA's surviving correspondence.

JEAL began writing the memoir on 30 March 1869 and was done in early September. According to his daughter's memoir of him [Mary Augusta Austen-Leigh: James Edward Austen-Leigh: A Memoir, privately published in 1911], JEAL's A Memoir was published on 16 December 1869 -- what would have been JA's 94th birthday. The volume contains a postscript dated 17 November 1869, JEAL's own 71st birthday. In any event, the volume, published in a small print run of about 1000, bore the publication year 1870. A revised second edition of the memoir, published or at least printed on JEAL's 72nd birthday, dated 1871. (This sort of forward-dating is common in book-publishing, at least partly because it makes books seem fresher longer. Another book I can think of that was forward-dated was Sigmund Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams -- it was published on November 4, 1899, but the date in the book is 1900.) Don't tell me you didn't need to read all this -- it's too late.

Two important documents that contributed to JEAL's memoir were written by JA's favorite brother Henry, who had seen her novels through to publication, including Northanger Abbey and Persuasion, which were published posthumously. Henry wrote a ``Biographical Notice'' that prefaced the two posthumous novels. (The four previous novels had been published anonymously, though their common authorship was indicated as they appeared successively.) Henry Austen's ``Memoir'' of 1833 was largely a shorter reworking of the 1818 notice, padded back up with quotes of favorable reviews, for inclusion in a new publication of Sense and Sensibility.

Ordained in 1823, JEAL was a clergyman his entire life. Yes, some clergymen hunted. Those who could, I think. Chaplain Groves (US Army), father of General Leslie R. (``Dick'') Groves, of the Manhattan Engineer District, was a severe Presbyterian who considered ``any leisure-time activity other than reading, hunting, and fishing to be a frivolous waste of time if not downright diabolical.'' [I quote William Lawren from p. 45 of a book mentioned at this MED entry.] Interestingly, from 1852 on, JEAL was the vicar of Bray, sir!

jean

A durable cotton fabric useful for long treks across the Scrabble tablelands. Gee (``Jea''?), I wonder if this has anything to do with pants called jeans. In any case, the plural jeans is also accepted by all three major Scrabble dictionaries, but of these three only OSPD4 and TWL2006 accept jeaned (as an adjective). That word was not in OSPD3 and is not in SOWPODS as of 2006. There's no mention of jeaning in any of the above-named dictionaries.

JEBO

Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization.

JECL

Job Entry Control Language.

JECS

Journal of Early Christian Studies. Catalogued by TOCS-IN. Used to be called Second Century and abbreviated SCent.

JEDC

Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control. A journal, as you have probably surmised. An economics journal. About dynamics and control.

I hope that's clear.

JEDEC

Joint Electron Device Engineering Council.

In a talk on 1997.10.1, a speaker on JEDEC specs in development was asked what ``JEDEC'' stood for, and he said ``it used to stand for'' the expansion above, ``but everyone had trouble remembering that so now it's just `jedec'.'' [Both ees short, accent on the first syllable.] (It's a good thing I put these comments in the glossary shortly after the meeting. I was just throwing away some old notes from that meeting, and ``jedec `used to' '' was all I had scribbled down.) It would help people realize that JEDEC no longer has an expansion if it was written

Jedec

See previous entry.

JEDI

Joint Enforcement Database Initiative.

May the Enforce be with you.

Jeep

It seems to be generally believed that the word jeep, as a common noun or proper noun for the vehicle, originated as a pronunciation of an abbreviation GP (GP ... ``Gee Pee'' ... ``Jeep''). If so, the GP stood for either General Purpose (vehicle) or as a manufacturer's internal designation of the vehicle for part numbering, the G standing for government. It might have stood for both, if quartermasters correctly misinterpreted the manufacturer's code.

Originally introduced by Sir Harold Austin as a rugged utility vehicle for the American market, it never quite caught on in the twenties and thirties; the American Austin company, reorganized under some other name I forgot, continued to make them in small numbers right up to the war. They achieved a small cult following. When the US went to war, bids were requested for a general-purpose 4WD military vehicle, to be produced in unheard-of numbers. The successful bids were all for minor variations on that American Austin vehicle. Ford and Willys produced 75 per day, and from 1942, when civilian production was halted for the duration of the war, that was the closest thing to a car that American industry produced. After the war, Willys continued to manufacture a 2WD version for the civilian market, instead of returning to conventional car production. They eventually made some small ``improvements'' like roll-down windows.

In the 70's, the military finally replaced the Jeep with the HMMWV (Humvee).

WWII-surplus jeeps in the Philippines were converted to small, garishly decorated open buses called jeepneys. Here's a page with lots of Philippine Jeepneys. A similar vehicle is used in Puerto Rico.

It's Willys and not Willy's, after owner John North Willys. The Jeep vehicle and brand has been a kind of curse -- a perennial survivor of the auto companies that manufactured it. American Motors (AMC) had the Jeep for a number of years after Willys folded, and introduced the highly successful Wagoneer series. Renault tried to make a go of American Motors, and when they sold AMC to the Chrysler Corporation, Jeep was the only product line that eventually survived (I think they kept up the Eagle line for a little bit). In 1999, Chrysler ``merged with'' (i.e., was diplomatically taken over by) Daimler-Benz, which unloaded it for a loss in 2007. Chrysler's Plymouth brand was an immediate casualty of the takeover, but Jeep keeps on truckin'.

JEES

Japan Educational Exchanges and Services. JEES ``provides services and supports for all students in Japan to promote international understanding and exchange.'' One service it does not appear to provide is a homepage in any language other than Japanese, although the site for its Japanese Language Proficiency Test (JLPT) is in English. Aw, geez!

JEIDA

Japan Electronic Industries Development Association. Merged with EIAJ in 2000 to form JEITA.

jein

German,`yes and no,' from ja and nein. Part of the reason this works is that, despite orthographic appearances, the two words share a vowel. This is apparent in IPA, in which the words are written /ja/ and /nai:n/.

JEITA

Japan Electronic and Information Technology Industries Association. Created on November 1, 2000 in the merger of the two Japanese electronics industry associations EIAJ and JEIDA.

JELLY

Jerusalem English { Language | Lending } Library for Youth.

JEMI

Joint Equipment Manufacturers Initiative.

Jenney

Short for a four-year series of Latin textbooks. They had their origin in Minnie L. Smith's First Latin lessons (1904). Charles Jenney, Jr., authored revisions to later versions of that book at least as early as 1954, and eight years later, it was still being published as Smith and Thompson's First year Latin, revised by Charles Jenney, Jr. (Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1962). Jenney's second-year book then was called Scudder's Second year Latin, revised by Charles Jenney, Jr.

Allyn and Bacon had a front-page advertisement for the set on the 1948-49 school year's first issue of Classical Weekly (CW). The advertisement bore the caption ``Latin and World Peace.'' Those were the days. The days of dodgy reasoning, among other things. It's not like that any more. From the ad, I infer that the third-year book was by Kelsey and Meinecke by then, and the fourth-year by Carlisle and Richardson. I have no idea how well coordinated the original ``well-tested Series'' was.

The books have continued to be revised by an army of successors, but (or perhaps therefore) the only author whose name appears on the cover nowadays is Jenney's (Jenney's First Year Latin, etc.), and there are workbooks available for the first two years. (In 1948 there was a workbook by Thompson and Peters, and an associated volume of classical myths compiled by Herzberg.) Your opinion of the books is bound to depend strongly on your opinion regarding the value of the traditional ``grammar-translation'' approach. It is a very traditional book based on ``real Latin'' -- excerpts from classical literature -- rather than made-up readings. Other texts typically introduce ``real Latin'' in the fourth year. Here's a detailed review. (There is some sentiment that the 1984 edition is better than the subsequently improved versions.)

Jennifer

A girl born in 1974.

Jennifer Jones

1. The mother of Tom Jones in Richardson's novel of that name.
2. A contributor to various web resources on Victorian literature, such as Voice of the Shuttle: English Literature and The Victorian Canon. [The latter is a ``web site devoted to investigating the problem of taste and aesthetics with regard to the Victorian canon in particular, and to the canon debates in the academy in general . . .  contains on-line syllabi (e.g. Victoriana: The Popular Canon; The Victorian Novel; Victorian Poetry; The Novel and the Long 19th Century; Literature of Empire), on-line texts (including short stories by Lady Jane Wilde and Mary Elizabeth Braddon), images, external links, and a theory archive.''] Okay, so Richardson is pre-Victorian; it's close.
3. An Academy-Award-winning actress. She starred as Emma Bovary in the 1949 movie Madame Bovary, which was constructed as a frame narrative about Gustave Flaubert's famous novel. She co-starred in The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, discussed at the Babbitt entry. In her mid-twenties, she was cast as the fourteen-year-old Bernadette in the 1943 Song of Bernadette. This is a story about the creation of the religious attraction at Lourdes, and as such you expect it to have taken place in medieval times, but Bernadette reported her vision in 1858. Madonna named her daughter Lourdes. It seems to run in the family. Once I mentioned to Sabine that I had met a woman named Bernadette in France, and she laughed out loud -- Bernadette seemed such an old-fashioned name to her.
4. There's another Jennifer Jones in show business, as well as a Jennifer Leigh Jones and J.B. Jones, who has gone by ``Jennifer Jones,'' and assorted Jennifer Joneses in non-acting roles.

Jenny

Woman's name, or nickname for Jennifer.

jenny

Female donkey.

JEP

Journal of Economic Psychology. Do you really want to pay for this journal? Buy it and see.

jerk

1. Third time derivative of position, equivalently the (first) time derivative of acceleration. Corresponds approximately to the ordinary notion of a jerk.
2. [Among the old Los Alamos `device' makers] an energy of 10¹⁶ ergs. Does not correspond even approximately to anything ordinary.

jeroboam

Five-liter resealable container for ethanol-water solutions. Cf. the smaller magnum and the larger double imperial. I learned all this cool stuff by watching TV.

The term jerry can, for a flat-sided metal fuel can, capacity about five (US) gallons, stems from jeroboam in the sense of a large fluid container. A lot of folks who don't drink enough probably suppose it has something to do with this other jerry.

JERRV

Joint Explosive Ordinance Disposal Rapid Response Vehicle.

jerry

A German soldier, blitzing his way across the low-lying rectilinear battlelines of the Scrabble tablelands.

JERS

Japanese Earth Resources Satellite.

JES

Job Entry Subsystem.

jess

A regular verb (regular in the morphological sense, anyway) meaning to fasten straps around the legs of a hawk. Even if you're not into falconry, but just happen to find yourself lost and looking for a way out of the Scrabble forest, you might find this a useful word. Keep in mind also...

jesse

This is an alternate spelling of jess. It's accepted by all three major Scrabble dictionaries.

JESSI, Jessi

Joint European Submicron Silicon Initiative.

JEST

Journal of Extraneous Scientific Topics. SBF homeboy sez: Check it out!

JET

Joint European Torus. An old tokomak.

I thought the major was a lady suffragette. (Hey, a jet has wings, Wings had a Jet.)

JETP

Journal of Experimental and Theoretical Physics. The Physical Review Letters (PRL) of the Russian Federation.

JETRO, Jetro

Japan External TRade Organization.

JETS

Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society.

JETS

The Junior Engineering Technical Society. ``Promoting Interest in Engineering, Science, Mathematics and Technology.'' An associate society of the AAES.

jeunes des banlieues

French term literally meaning `suburban youths.' A euphemism for ``beurs'' (not a euphemism) from any of the crime-infested rings of housing projects (see HLM) that were built on the outskirts of French cities in the 1960's and 1970's.

In October 2005, when major rioting broke out in les banlieues around Paris, Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy repeatedly objected to the euphemism, insisting for example that voyous (`thugs') was a better word for the rioters than jeunes (`youth'). A snit-load of biens-pensants criticized him for using accurate terms such as this and racaille, q.v.

JEZ

Joint (J) Engagement Zone. This is not the romantic kind of engagement. This is a different kind, also expected to end only when someone has died. For a nonelliptic explanation, see the weapon engagement zone entry of the DOD's online Dictionary of Military Terms.

JFA

Journal of Field Archaeology. Catalogued by TOCS-IN. If you think field archaeology is all the archaeology there is, consider IJNA.

JFA

If you're looking for the LGBT equal-rights organization with ``Justice for All'' in its name, you want AJA (And Justice for All).

JFA

Justice For All. ``Justice For All and our JFA E-mail Network were formed [apparently by the AAPD] to defend and advance disability rights and programs in the 104th Congress [1995-1997]. One JFA goal is to work with national and state organizations of people with disabilities to get the word from Washington D.C. out to the grassroots.''

JFA

Justice For All. ``Justice For All shall act as an advocate for change in a criminal justice system that is inadequate in protecting the lives and property of law-abiding citizens.'' JFA sponsors <murdervictims.com> and <prodeathpenalty.com>.

JFAST

Joint (Military Services) Flow and Analysis System for Transportation.

JFDI

Just Do It! Adjective, as in ``JFDI methodology.''

The story is told that once, after presenting a paper at a conference of film academics, P. Adams Sitney was asked by an audience member how he would characterize the methodology used for his analysis. Sitney replied,

My methodology is called `watching the films.'

JFDP

Junior Faculty Development Program. There's one run by USAID for Russia.

JFE

Journal of Fluids Engineering. LC number TA357.T69; published by ASME.

JFET, J-FET

Junction Field-Effect Transistor (FET). First proposed by William Shockley in Procs. of the IRE, 40, 1365 (1952). The first functioning JFET was made by G. C. Dacey and I. M. Ross, ibid., 41, 970 (1953).

JFF

Jordanian Fencing Federation. No-no: not that kind of fencing. No, not that kind either! Fencing the sport -- with swords'n'all.

JFIF

JPEG File Interchange Format.

JFM

Journal of Fluid Mechanics. LC number QA901.J87 . First volume in 1956. It took 33 years to generate the first two hundred volumes; it took six years to generate the next hundred.

JFR

Jane's Foreign Report. (``Foreign'' here means other than UK.) For a list of information services offered by Jane's Information Group, see our entry for Jane's Fighting Ships.

JFS

Journaled File System. IBM disk-use system for machines running AIX, as near as I can make out.

JFK

John Fitzgerald Kennedy. A US president. Also an airport (next entry). John Forbes Kerry, another Roman Catholic Senator, also a Massachusetts Democrat, ran for president in 2004, another closely contested, high turn-out election. If he had won, we'd have had a massive namespace collision that might've taken years to sort out. Instead, we got President Bush. Man, did we ever dodge a bullet!

JFK

IATA code for John F. Kennedy International Airport. Located on the southern coast of Long Island. It used to be called Idlewild, after the location, although the official name was New York International Airport. Renamed for the assassinated president in memoriam. JFK is one of four airports for which reservations are always allocated by the ARO. Here's its status in real time from the ATCSCC.

JG

Junction-Gate [of a Junction (-gate) Field-Effect Transistor (JFET)].

JGU

Japanese Geomorphological Union.

Jhb

JoHannesBurg. One local name for the town is eGoli, meaning `city of gold.' Another town that doesn't have any native gold resources is Jerusalem, which has the epithet Yerushalayim shel zahar, `Jerusalem of gold.'

JHBC

Jackson Hole Bible College.

``One God ... One Creation ... One Year ... One Foundation'' Trilogy. (Sorry, felt like sneaking that in.)

``Jackson Hole Bible College is a one-year, in depth study of the scriptures with a creation emphasis leading to a Biblical Foundation and Christian Worldview. ... We are dedicated to providing our students with a quality program combining outdoor recreational activities and solid Biblical teaching.''

One question you will ponder: ``How was the Grand Canyon really formed?'' Somehow I get the idea that this isn't going to be addressed from the ordinary godless perspective of a typical geology course. (Someone mentioned last February 2004 that there was a news story on just this topic: A book claiming that the Grand Canyon was formed in the aftermath of the Biblical flood was for sale at a US Park Service gift shop.)

Another: ``Could all the animals really fit on the Ark?'' Sure -- at the time all the life forms were prokaryotes.

Located in Jackson, Wyoming. ``Come visit our campus in the center of the beautiful Tetons.'' Pretty racy language for a bible college.

JHI

Journal of the History of Ideas. Published by Johns Hopkins University Press. Catalogued by TOCS-IN.

J Homosexual

ISI abbreviation for the Journal of HOMOSEXUALity. I guess nothing shorter would do. They wanted to avoid confusion in case someone should start up a publication called Journal of Homologous Series (J Homo Se). I'm sure that's the reason.

Okay, the manuscripts were due at the end of August, and the following June, we heard that the relevant special issue was in press. It's November, two issues have appeared since the heads-up, but our issue hasn't. This isn't slow -- not even a little strange. It's f---in' queer!

There's actually a little bit of historical information (in your face!) at the GLQ entry.

J-horror

Horrible film of Japan origin. Ah, sorry, please mistake, ah, HORROR film of Japanese origin.

Required features:

1. Creepy little girl with long, dark hair.
2. Supernatural stuff.
3. Water as symbol of death.
4. Western stars.

Recommended features:

1. Remake of version with all-Japanese cast.
2. Kouji Suzuki included in writing credits.

Movies like ``The Ring'' (2002) (not to be mistaken for the 1998 version with an all-Japanese cast or the 1999 Korean version), ``The Grudge'' (2004) (not to be mistaken for ``Ju-on: The Grudge'' (2003), Japanese cast), and ``Dark Water'' (2005).

JHOS

Jobs, Health care, Oil, and Security. Pronounced, not very propitiously, ``jay-hose.'' Acronym, used within the 2004 Kerry presidential campaign, to refer to the campaign's essential message. Democratic presidential campaigns seem to generate more neologisms. Cf. scorps.

Y'NO, I hadn't realized Kerry 2004 had a prospective policy-related message, but if I'd had to guess, I guess I'd have been way off. It's true that campaigns don't regularly have the luxury of being about what they'd like to be about, but this was ridiculous.

JHP

Journal of the History of Philosophy. ISSN 0022-5053.

JHPIEGO

JHPIEGO, the Johns Hopkins Program for International Education in Reproductive Health. I know, I know: it's a little bit difficult to extract the initials G-O from the words Reproductive Health. I only found this expansion in an article from 1999. Since then, they're even more reluctant to give an expansion. A few pages have the expansion, but the easiest way to find a page that gives it is to guess the expansion correctly first. It's the ``Johns Hopkins Program for International Education in Gynecology and Obstetrics.''

When they were founded, in 1973 or so, this was okay; since then, I guess the gee and oh terms have become increasingly politically fraught, so they're covering their, uh, asses. We live in a crazy world, but what's the alternative? As of January 2005, 300 googled pages use the acronym JHPIEGO for every one that gives its expansion. That's unusual, but here at SBF it's our bread and butter, or anyway our virtual bread and butter.

JHS

Journal of Hebrew Scriptures.

JHS

Journal of Hellenic Studies. Founded in 1880, but it still hasn't got a website of its very own. Catalogued by TOCS-IN. A publication of the Hellenic Society (SPHS), annual since 1958 (previously semiannual).

Since the 1950's the JHS has had a supplement entitled Archaeological Reports (AR).

JHS

Junior High School. Typically seventh through ninth grades, distinguished from middle school, which ends at eighth grade (extended random thoughts at the MS entry).

JHU

Johns Hopkins University. The only university whose name is an admissions test. If you misspell the university. name, they won't admit you.

JHU-CTY

Johns Hopkins University CTY.

JI

Joint Implementation (of action on greenhouse gases).

JI

Junction Isolation (q.v.).

JIC

Apparently Japan International Cooperation. Standards.

JIC

Joint Industry Committee. An organization that standardizes hydraulic fittings specifications and symbols. More standards.

George Westinghouse, now best remembered for his electrical enterprises, made his fortune with an air brake for trains, and was a great proponent of industrial standardization. He lost his money in a crash (of the stock market) and died poor.

JIC

Joint Information Center.

JICA

Japan International Cooperation Agency.

JICC

Japan Industrial Conference on Cleaning.

JICC

Jerusalem International Computers and Communication.

JICC

Joint Industry Coupon Committee.

JICST

Japan Information Center of Science and Technology.

JID

Jane's Intelligence Digest. They've really leveraged the name recognition now. JID is part of Jane's Information Group. For a list of their information services, see our entry for Jane's Fighting Ships.

JIEO

Joint Interoperability and Engineering Organization. [Of US Dept. of Defense (DOD).]

JIES

Journal of Indo-European Studies. A journal catalogued in TOCS-IN.

jigger

A dry liquid measure: 1.5 oz.

Jigger

Obsolete term for four iron (golf club).

JIIP

Japanese Institute of Intellectual Property.

JIL

Job Information List. The MLA has one that's divided up by academic disciplines.

Abstracted from the English Edition of the October MLA JIL's, 1975-1998, here is a graph of the number of positions listed. It peaked at 1053 positions in 1988. Another graph, served by ADE, shows the number of Ph.D.'s granted (probably only in the US) in English and American language and literature, 1958-2000. The curve has a similar shape, but it peaks at 1412 in 1973.

jill

An alternate spelling of the volume unit normally spelled gill. Like gaol (British spelling of jail, pronounced ``jail''), gill is pronounced with a ``soft gee.'' So even though few people will recognize the unit in this alternate spelling, at least they'll know how to pronounce it. Also, it's accepted by all three major Scrabble dictionaries.

The gill is now generally taken to be equal to a quarter of a pint: 4 fluid ounces in the God-Ordained Tradition! System of Weights and Measures in use in the US, or 5 fluid ounces in the old British Imperial system. (Note that those are different fluid ounces: the fluid ounce of the US customary system is a volume equal to 1.8046875 cu. in., while the British fluid ounce measures 1.733871 cu. in., approximately.)

A half a gill (an eighth of a pint) is a noggin... in some places. In others it's equal to twice or four times that. Ain't it great? At various times and places, mostly in the past and England, a gill has also been a half pint, and in those places a quarter pint was a jack.

In Tour of the Hebrides for September 20, 1773, Boswell records Johnson's saying ``Each man called for his own half-pint of wine, or gill, if he pleased.'' I don't know how ``or'' was meant there (i.e., I don't know whether it is implied that a gill is a half pint), but I think it's worth pointing out that until British Imperial units were introduced, the Scots pint was a volume about equal to 1.80 US quarts.

Let's consider the spellings. English spelling generally reflects etymology, so that the pronunciation of certain letter sequences depends on the origin (or sometimes the mistakenly imputed origin) of the word. The initial letter sequence gi is a case in point.

The g is normally ``hard'' (or ``guttural'') in words of Germanic origin. Examples include giddy, gift, gild, gilt, gird, girdle, girth, girl, and give.

The g is ``soft'' in words taken from French, Italian, or Latin (even if they only passed through one of these languages on their way from Arabic or Greek). Relatively simple examples include giant, gibbet, giblet, gigantic, gigolo, ginger, and gingivitis. Gill itself is from the Old French gille, from the medieval Latin gillus, a wine vessel. Some exceptions to the rule can be explained on the basis of gui- spellings in Old French, including gimlet, gingham, and probably gizzard. More complicated things have happened as well (see gaol).

I suppose all this information really belongs at a gill entry rather than at this jill ``alternate spelling'' entry. Therefore, its presence here is a bonus.

Just to round out the entry, I should point out that in seventeenth-century England, the gill was once a unit used to measure quantities of tin, and in that application it corresponded to a full pint.

JIM

Japan Institute of Metals.

Jim

A nickname for James. In fact, ``James'' has a somewhat formal sound, so most Jameses are called Jim by their friends. But an Indian friend of mine is named James, and he doesn't use ``Jim'' because in many languages of the Indian subcontinent, jim means `dog.'

jimmie

A tiny bit of candy for decorating ice cream, and a valid Scrabble word (with regular plural) according to the OSPD4 and the TWL2006. It wasn't listed in OSPD3 and was added to SOWPODS during the year or so before June 2007.

Jimmy

Diminutive form of Jim.

jimmy

Jimmy the lock! Donald -- duck! Shit, John! It's a snap, Ginger! Oh Joy! You understand, Ken?

Jimmy

Name that GM came up with for its GMC truck division products. Cf. RB.

Jimo

Jupiter Icy Moons Orbiter. A proposed NASA vehicle that could move in and out of orbit around three of Jupiter's largest and most distant moons. The orbiter, to be powered by a nuclear reactor (for instruments and for an ion propulsion system) and expected to cost billions of dollars, is not expected to launch any earlier than 2011; exploratory studies for the project only began in February 2003.

JIMS, JIMSS

Journal of Intelligent Material Systems and Structures.

JIR

Jane's Intelligence Review. Just how much intelligence can they have if they try to hijack the acronym of the real JIR? How bright is that? They want the free publicity, sure. For a list of information services offered by Jane's Information Group, see our entry for Jane's Fighting Ships.

JIR

Journal of Irreproducible Results.^TM Either this or Nature (London) is the most widely read scientific journal in the world. This is particularly impressive when you consider that JIR is no longer published as a periodical -- they're just reprinting best-of collections in book form. For something that's up-to-date, but no less um, whatever, see AIR.

JIRCAS

Japan International Research Center for Agricultural Sciences.

JIS

Japan Industrial Standard. Standards established by JISC (infra). More English-friendly JIS information served from Chiba University.

JIS

Jurisdictional Interstate Service.

JISA

Japan Information Service Association. (In English also.)

JISC

Japan Industrial Standards Committee.

JISC

Joint Information Systems Committee (of UK). Sometimes incorrectly expanded ``SubCommittee.'' Man, that kindof sloppiness really gets on my nerves.

JISCII

Japanese Industrial Standard Code for Information Interchange. Slang designation of JIS character set standards, modeled after ASCII (q.v.).

JISP

Juvenile Intensive Supervision Program. A New Jersey alternate-punishment program. See the ISP entry.

JIT

Just In Time. A manufacturing strategy that minimizes the capital invested in inventory by substituting close coordination with suppliers. First widely implemented in Japan, where many companies belong to keiretsu (loose conglomerates, very loosely speaking) that engender broad cooperation. There are both horizontal and vertical (integration) keiretsu, and some of both kinds would probably be in violation of antitrust law in the US. Most allegations of predatory practices by Keiretsu are never proven. It reminds me of the mob boss in ``Guys and Dolls.''

The acronym is also used in computer programming. In general it refers to the second stage in certain two-stage compilations. In the first stage, the source code of a stand-alone program or module is ``compiled'' to byte code. In the second stage, which occurs at run time, the byte code is ``JIT compiled'' or ``jitted'' into an executable. This sort of two-stage compilation, and the term JIT, are characteristic of Java in general, and of all programming languages running within Microsoft's .NET framework.

JITC

Joint Interoperability Testing Center.

JIT Lieferung

German term meaning `Just In Time delivery.' In other words, it means `JIT.'

JITSR

International Journal of IT Standards and Standardization Research.

JIU

Josai International University. A new university in Japan, founded 1992. The initialism is (as is fairly standard for romaji acronyms) given using English letter names (i.e., pronounced ``jay eye you'' -- or rather jei ai yu in romaji). You can hear this on the university song (WAV format here).

JIVE

Joint Institute for VLBI in Europe.

When we learned the word ogive in statistics (used as an alternate term for a cumulative distribution function) in high school, somebody observed that it was like, so cool to say ``oh jive!''

J.-J.

Jean-Jacques.

JJA

June, July, August. Aggregated Summer data. Take your complaints to the MAM entry. Cf. DJF, SON.

JJAP

Japanese Journal of Applied Physics.

JJ coupling

A procedure for treating the LS coupling in high-Z atoms (and essentially all nuclei), which for some electrons (nucleons) is so strong as to rival the residual Coulomb (internuclear) interaction magnitude. The procedure consists in first treating the LS coupling of individual electrons (nucleons), to define states of definite L, S, J and J_z, and then to treat the residual interaction as a perturbation coupling different J states.

JJRS

Japanese Journal of Religious Studies.

jk

JoKe. Chatese.

JKFF

JK Flip-Flop. ``JK'' stands for Jordan and Kelly, the inventors. Or so I've heard. I've also read in various places that in 1919 W. H. Eccles and F. W. Jordan published the first FF circuit design. They called the circuit a ``trigger.''

JKR

J. K. Rowling.

J. K. Rowling

Pen name of Joanne Rowling, author of the hugely successful children's book series about the young wizard Harry Potter. It was supposed that boys would be less inclined to buy a book if they thought the author was a woman, hence the use of initials. Since a single initial tends to look unbalanced or inadequate, Rowling used the initials J. and K. The kay honors her late paternal grandmother Kathleen. Rowling, seemingly inappropriately, rhymes with bowling rather than howling.

In college, Rowling read French with a Classics subsid (majored in French and minored in Classics; you could do a Classics subsid at Exeter without studying Latin). In one interview no longer at its old URL she said,

I went to Exeter University straight after school, where I studied French. This was a big mistake. I had listened too hard to my parents, who thought languages would lead to a great career as a bilingual secretary.

Her books are full of Latinate invented words, and she gave Hogwarts school the Latin motto Draco Dormiens Nunquam Tit