Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2015 June 13

= June 13 =

Search results jamming
Is there any name for a phenomenon when a more common word (such as peep show) becomes overwhelmed in search results by recent trends, such as Peep Show (TV series)? E.g., in this case. Brandmeistertalk  12:29, 13 June 2015 (UTC)
 * Somewhere I picked up the eponymous "Google-blind" though a hasty search suggests this might be idiolectic. -- Deborahjay (talk) 15:49, 13 June 2015 (UTC)


 * The flood is called saturation, so I suppose when results don't float to the top, that's a "sinking" or "drowning". The signal-to-noise ratio touches on the general problem. InedibleHulk (talk) 20:05, 13 June 2015 (UTC)

Jag-time tune
The second line of Robert Service's The Shooting of Dan McGrew (complete poem here) speaks of a piano player "hitting a jag-time tune". The player is later (line 19) referred to as a "rag-time kid". My first thought was that "jag-time" was a typo for rag time, but that doesn't seem to be the case. (Or if it is a typo, then it dates to the original publication.) So, what is "jag-time"? -- ToE 18:31, 13 June 2015 (UTC)
 * Searching for jagtime (one word) turns up a few interesting hits, such as this. Seems to be a synonym for or complementary term to "ragtime". Matt Deres (talk) 15:21, 14 June 2015 (UTC)
 * I have no source (both Partridge's Dictionary of Slang and DARE are silent on jag-time), but one common slang meaning of jag is (in the words of the aforementioned DARE) "a drunken spree; a drinking binge". That seems appropriate for music being played when "a bunch of the boys were whooping it up in the Malamute saloon" and for music with "small vignettes of four drunk, stereotypical black men" on the cover. Maybe related, maybe not. Deor (talk) 17:30, 14 June 2015 (UTC)


 * This gives some suggestions as to how the name came about. CambridgeBayWeather, Uqaqtuq (talk), Sunasuttuq 00:17, 15 June 2015 (UTC)


 * I had always assumed that "jag-time" was a synonym for ragtime, rather than a typo.
 * By the way,
 * Back 'o the bar, in a Solo game, sat Dangerous Dan McGrew
 * I used to think that meant he was playing solitaire. Then in college I got into cards in a semi-serious way, and I found out that's not so.  Solo is actually a game in the skat family.  Looks like our article on it is at solo whist. --Trovatore (talk) 04:02, 16 June 2015 (UTC)
 * Looking at that article, it doesn't have as much to do with skat as I thought. It's a trick-taking game with temporary alliances and a misère option, but that's about it &mdash; no scoring by values of captured cards, no promotion of the ten, no jacks as permanent trump.  I'm pretty sure there's a game called Yukon in which jacks are permanent trump, but I don't seem to find an article on it in WP.  That may have influenced me. --Trovatore (talk) 04:09, 16 June 2015 (UTC)
 * In case anyone is curious, here are the rules of Yukon, in case anyone is interested, though with one point unclear. --Trovatore (talk) 05:38, 16 June 2015 (UTC)

Thanks all! What had troubled me was that I couldn't find a single similar usage of jag-time elsewhere, but I hadn't thought to search without the hyphen. Trovatore, I too assumed solitaire until  "I guess I'll make it a spread misere," said Dangerous Dan McGrew. led me to look up that term. -- ToE 11:51, 16 June 2015 (UTC)