In Praise of "Jitbag"
Welcome to Philadelphia, where now, even words wind up getting gentrified. It’s the kind of place where “jawn,” born in our high schools and neighborhoods out of an inner-city teenage urge to make everything cool, is now a pair of earrings on a white lady who just moved here from Seattle and paid $600K for a trinity that faces the grill fan of the Melrose Diner. (See also: search string for “jawn” on Etsy.) It’s the kind of place where aping our hoagiemouth accent has become a kind of acceptable class-based minstrelsy (to be fair, that accent had it coming). It’s even a zone where, in an office across town, there’s a dialog going on that’s like, we don’t say “Phily” anymore, it may be perceived as downmarket by potential season-ticket holders.
But do you know what Philly word resists all of this, what Philly word still lands like a fucking ice pick, and by its very nature is a gauntlet, unutterable unless you are ready to throw down?
Jitbag. Jitbag is that word. Where jawn can be cute all day, jitbag is decidedly not nice. Ever. We can leave it to the etymologists to do the dig, but this writer has family history that sees the word in use going back to, at the very least, the middle of the last century in this region. Its primary meaning, of course, would be a bag of jit; or, as you may more commonly know it, a used condom. There’s something almost Cockney about it, if you will pardon the pun. But its usage, as anyone who’s ever heard it darted across a street or a bar or a playground or a poker table, is an epithet as spiky and electric as the English language has ever given us. Many of us abide the dictum “don’t start none, won’t be none,” but the very presence of “jitbag” on the scene indicates that someone has started some, and now there will be quite a bit.
We live in the golden age of jitbags. They assail us from every corner: the financial industry (think of Steven Mnuchin), the media (hello Tucker, you utter jitbag), Congress (Ms. Boebert, would you like an extra seat for your firearm and your satchel of jit?), the populace (Proud Boys on down to your run-of-the-mill nasty maskless Target customer) and on and on. So much jit, so much bag, and so little time to live our lives.
And recognizing this is important. Because a jitbag is not just an asshole. A jitbag is an asshole cast off, discarded, useless to the point of comedy. The bag, his (it’s almost always a he) horrid fleshy container. And with regard to that container’s contents? Well: What, in 2021 same as it ever was, is more utterly useless than a man’s semen?
Answer: A whole dead bag of it. A jitbag.
And like it or not, the jitbag belongs to us. No one else but Philadelphians would dare name it. No one else would dare claim it.
— Joey Sweeney
