Published June 9, 2010
OK, so what’s a “jake?” I had never heard this word for firefighter until I moved to Boston, where the slang is regularly splashed on the Herald’s front pages.
I called my friend Grant Barrett, a respected slanguist and the co-host of public radio’s A Way With Words, for an explanation.
“That’s a big fat origin unknown,” he said, to my disappointment. He did pose a few possibilities:
- Jake could refer to a kind of Jamaican root beer in the 1920s that was poisoned and caused nerve damage. The word could also refer to the beverage’s effect on the imbiber, who became “jakey,” as in jittery. It is possibly a stereotype about Boston’s hard-drinkin’ Irish firemen. (If this is true, the irony is delicious, given that the union is criticized for demanding quid pro quo for agreeing to drug testing.)
- Jake could simply be a variant of Jack, a nickname for John, that stuck.
- Jake has also been used for cops (though I have never heard that usage).
Grant said he would do more research. Meanwhile, my colleague Dave Shaw sent this entry from the highly unscientific but always reliable Urban Dictionary:
New England affectionate slang for Firefighter. This word was first used as a reference to firemen in the early 20th century in the Greater Boston area, and it’s origins are recognized as officially unknown by several authors. While it is now a widely accepted term in the fire service, it is almost exclusively used in New England, and almost exclusively used to bestow great praise and the highest levels of respect. To be called a “Good Jake” is the highest form of praise a Boston area firefighter can possibly receive from a peer.
The term “Jake” is most probably derived from the term “J-Key”. The first street-corner fire alarm box system was invented and constructed in the city of Boston, and was based on a telegraph system, novel in its day. Inside each box, next to the automatic alarm mechanism that tripped when someone pulled the hook, there was a small telegraph tapper, called a telegraph key, that firemen could use to communicate back to headquarters once they arrived on scene. As time passed, many World War One veterans had become Boston firefighters, and the telegraphs that these men were familiar with were the U.S. Army issue J-3 portable telegraph key (known as the WWI “trench key”), as well as other military J-Series telegraph keys, which were all known commonly as “J-Keys”. These veterans probably used this as a common slang for the keys they used inside their fire alarm boxes.
Being a “Good J-Key” probably meant a fireman who was cool under the pressure and could send clear morse code. “J-Key” was eventually shortened to “Jake”, and when spread to the public, “Jake” came to be a common term for firemen in general.
Note that we don’t know the identity of the the author, L2Jake, and that the entry has more “thumbs down” than “thumbs up.” FWIW.
Any firefighters out there want to weigh in?