I am not certain when or how the insult jackwagon first entered, or more likely re-entered, my daily vocabulary. But it has.

Words are just that way. Sometimes we will find a word waiting for us on the tip of our tongues and we have no idea where or how it got there. Was it a word we recently read or heard? Or is it something remembered from some distant time or place? Often, we never know.

According to one online dictionary:

jackwagon (noun): a slang insult meaning worthless or lazy that may have originated from the nickname of 19th century chow wagons in a wagon train.

An example of a jackwagon is an insult you would call someone who you thought was a loser.

I suspect since “jackwagon” is a 19th century word with apparent Western roots that I picked it up in an old Western novel or movie sometime. Yet in the back of my mind, I almost think I can remember hearing the word used in my childhood. Who used it, I do not know: an uncle, a grandfather, my father, a teacher? Since I did grow up in the West among cowboys and ranches it is indeed possible that many people in my past used it to describe some fool they knew.

What I do know for sure is that when I found myself using it recently– in reference to a guy speeding past me in a pickup with a Trump bumper-sticker– it had a natural Anglo-Saxon familiarity. It was not like some latinate picked up in a classroom or academic text. It was language “easy on the tongue.”

That is another interesting thing about language. There are simply words that feel right in our mouths. For English speakers these are usually words with an Anglo-Saxon root: curse words, insults, jeers, the common names of  familiar plants and animals. “Earthy” language. Latinates,”academic/formal” language, can never feel like that in our mouths.

So I am going to keep using the word “jackwagon.” The same as I am going to keep using other Anglo-Saxon vulgarities. And if people  tell me they don’t like it… well, those jackwagons “can all go straight ta’ hell!”