"Joint" is a word that in the course of my lifetime has engaged in some serious shape-shifting. When I first encountered the word, joint (derived from the Latin jungere, to join) was simply a place where two pieces of wood were glued together or where one's bones were articulated to produce a wrist, elbow, or knee. Mighty simple and uncomplicated, it would appear -- but even then "joint" had begun to accumulate variants. Rick Blaine's sentence in Casablanca was an early warning: "of all the gin joints in all the towns in the world, she has to come into mine." A "joint" was apparently a nightclub or bar. "Gin joint" suggests that "Rick's Cafe Americain" was louche or sleazy, and perhaps it was, what with all the crooked gambling going on and with the mysterious "letters of transit" stuffed into Sam's piano. But why "joint"? It seems fanciful to suppose that a joint was a place where various people "joined" together, but I can't think of a more persuasive etymology.
Another use of joint came to my attention in the late 1960's when I became seriously interested in Jacobean oak furniture. Here's a handsome "joint stool":
A joint stool was the most ordinary kind of chair during the period when Shakespeare was wielding his quill. Why "joint"? Apparently because it was a joined stool, and therefore of higher quality than one that was merely glued. A joiner was a skilled craftsman before mass-produced nails and screws became inexpensive and commonplace.
Shakespeare knew joint stools very well: "Cry you mercy, I took you for a joint-stool," says the Fool to a joint stool. Fool humors mad hallucinating Lear by pretending that the joint stool is the king's daughter Goneril. Shakespeare, by the by, played many a variation on "joint," employing or inventing such terms as "joint-servant," "joint-laborer," "joint-ring," "jointress," "unjointed," "injointed," "short-jointed," "conjointly," and "disjoint."
But even Shakespeare would not have imagined the transfigurations of the word in these our latter days. Nowadays, a joint is a prison, though I don't know why one would call it so when such colorful appellations as "hoosegow," "clink," "stir," "slammer," and "pokey" are all on the tips of our collective tongues. Nor would he have imagined "joint" as a marijuana blunt or spliff. He wouldn't have known but might have appreciated "joint" as a term for the male sexual organ.
All of which makes it possible, theoretically, to say, "I was in a joint, smoking a joint, figuring out how to exercise my joint."
As for me, I use the word "joint" everyday -- in the most useful phrase "joint card."
Other words of my life: slouch, cishet, yips, ramps, jot and tittle, worship, mucilage. spatchcock, umpire, stopper.
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