Phrasage Coinology

The time has come to set the record straight on what I feel is a very important matter. Have you ever heard a joke or an odd phrase and wondered to yourself, "Self, just who came up with that? What inspired and charismatic mind spewed forth such a nugget of communicative goodness?"?

Of course you have. Work with me here.

Now our good friend Nick would claim that there is no such thing as an original thought; that thoughts considered original in fact are possessed of fraudulent novelty. Nick is naturally ripping off a host of other esteemed thinkers in claiming such, and all those esteemed thinkers are basically just plagiarizing Einstein, who most likely stole the whole idea from his pool boy, killing the poor kid and burying the corpse in the foundation of his neighbor's new garage to cover his tracks. God knows who the pool boy heard it from. The fact is that Einstein was an Austrian, and Austrians hate Jews.

But you know who doesn't hate Jews? Me. I like the Jews just fine. When it comes to Jews, I'm a well wisher, in that I don't wish them any specific harm. As long as I'm stealing quotes, I'll steal this one: Why bother hating people based on race, creed or color? People will always provide you plenty of personalized reasons to hate them.

I mention this because the topic today is this: Getting Jewed. Jewing people. Jewage. Have you ever heard someone use this phrase? I certainly have. I don't hear it as often as "Hello" or even "Have you heard Love You Madly by Cake?" (Nick keeps asking me. I don't know why). But I certainly hear it more often than "I love Jann Arden" or "Help me hide this body". I hear people use it at school. People at work are using it. On the bus, in theatres, on the street, people are using this handy phrase. Not familiar with it? Basically, it describes being mistreated, as in:

• We got short-changed. That waitress jewed us.
  
• Boy, Ticketmaster sure jews you with those service charges.
  
• Nick's girlfriend left him and took his Cake CD. He sure got jewed.
  

See? Isn't it a handy phrase? And before you start stuffing explosives and viral contagions into envelopes and mailing them to me (that's ianwallace.com, C/O Nick Winnick, P.O. Box 255, Calgary, AB, T3B 4P7), keep in mind that this usage in no way implies that the perpetrator is a Jew. The clear implication is that these minor inconveniences put the victim on the same level as those Jews who have suffered centuries of getting a metaphorical ass-raping at every turn, first at the hands of God Himself, then by the Christians, then by the Nazis, then by whomever is persecuting them lately. Greenpeace, I think. I think we can all agree that this usage is not at all insulting as long as it is done in a humourously affectionate way and no Jewish people actually hear you do it.

So you may be wondering exactly who came up with this novel turn of phrase. Or you may just be reading this and hoping that I've buried a point somewhere for you to find. Well, wondering no longer: It was Colin. That's right- there's no mystery, no hidden origin lost to the sands of etymological time. Colin came up with it. Here's how: In high school - grade 11, I believe - Colin was discussing some incident of fiduciary mishandling with a classmate, who may have been Paul. "I got gypped", Colin remarked, using the age old slang term to denote having been "ripped off". Well, a certain eves-dropping classmate whose name I won't publish here, mainly because I've forgotten it, decided to chime in and chastise Colin for his choice of words, his shameless use of a term so derogatory of Gypsies. "Now just who gives a fuck about Gypsies?" is what I would have said in that situation, but Colin - ever the calm-spoken diplomat - simply turned to the classmate who may have been Paul and addended: "Sorry, I got jewed".

Since that fateful day, "jewed" has been an inextricable part of the vocabulary in the circles of Colin and I. But what we could never have predicted was that this phenomenon (or something like one, anyway) could have taken on a life of it's own and exploded outwards from our demented conversational detritus and into the North American zeitgeist. But it has, and I say that credit must be given where credit is due. I can assure you that we are the origins of this phrase. The circumstances of it's inception are too incident-specific to have occurred elsewhere within a timeframe appropriate for modern coinage to have occurred. Controlled laboratory tests in which witty people are exposed to the ludicrously tactless and unfashionable political-correctness of random people interrupting them would not produce results so distinctive in even 0.0001% of trials. So clearly Colin is the undisputed originator of this phrase. Unless you're Jewish; then Nick did it. Blame Nick.

I'd like to close by reiterating my affection for people of Jewish faith and/or ancestry, that the Gypsies are a proud of noble stock with a rich heritage, and that Cake are gay. Thank you.