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The word appeared no earlier than 1922, in the work of T.A. Coward (1867–1933). He was a Cheshire man, the son of a textile bleacher and Congregational minister who was a keen naturalist and a founding collector for what became the natural history section of the Manchester Museum. Coward’s great gift was clear exposition in newspaper articles (for the Manchester Guardian), lectures and books.
In 1922 he published Bird Haunts and Nature Memories, in which he included the following explanation: ‘A West Coast Irishman was familiar with the wild creatures which dwelt on or visited his rocks and shores; at a glance he could name them, usually correctly, but if asked how he knew them would reply, “By their jizz.” What is jizz? We have not coined it, but how wide its use in Ireland is, we cannot say. Jizz may be applied to or possessed by any animate and some inanimate objects, yet we cannot clearly define it. A single character may supply it, or it may be the combination of many.’
The Oxford English Dictionary is puzzled by the origin of this word. It notes that its meaning coincides with that of guise in one sense. But there is a difficulty in supposing them phonetically related.
I do not want to sully the word, but I cannot help thinking that the slang homologue might after all be the explanation. Jizz or jism has been used for more than a century to signify both ‘energy’ and ‘semen’. An exact parallel is spunk. The OED quotes jism from a word-list of Virginia folk speech from 1899, but a quotation from the 1840s refers to the spirit of a horse, where spunk might equally have been used. It seems to me perfectly reasonable to have extended the semantic range of jism from ‘energy’ or ‘spirit’ to the set or twitch of bird or beast.
This might all be a false scent, but in any case jizz remains a very useful word in its insulated behavioural sense.
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