jerk

   Mainly an American term for someone who is thought to be anything from silly to totally obnoxious. As with other insults it is easily converted into a friendly term of address. This happens in The Philanderer, by Stanley Kauffmann, where one man uses it to another. ‘You jerk’ is also friendly in Daughters of Mulberry, by Roger Longrigg. It becomes a mild insult in The Late Risers, by Bernard Wolfe, and is slightly unusual in being addressed to a woman in Looking for Mr Goodbar, by Judith Rossner. ‘Of course I’m serious, jerk,’ says a man in some irritation to the woman concerned. Chapman, in his Dictionary of American Slang, dates the use of the term from the 1930s and says that it derives from another slang expression, ‘jerking off’, a reference to masturbation. The fuller form of the vocative does in fact occur in Rabbit is Rich, by John Updike: ‘Ya still got scum on your hands, ya jerkoff.’