Jiggered is a slightly old-fashioned term meaning tired out, but at least one dictionary suspects that the origin of this word is aa a euphemism for buggered. It is a common thing in many languages, countries and societies, to imagine that by changing one or in this case, two letters, you can turn a downright dirty expletive into a socially acceptable exclamation. I lived in Ireland, where the robust four-letter Anglo-Saxon swear word (meaning copulation), is bowdlerised into the word “Feck!” which perfectly respectable people deem okay to say.
Bowdlerisation is named after the English physician Thomas Bowdler (1754–1825). In 1818 he published a censored version of William Shakespeare (The Family Shakespeare), expurgating “those words and expressions […] which cannot with propriety be read aloud in a family.”1
We shall encounter this phenomenon again when we come to words of a religious bent – but not until the letter Z (spoiler alert – for Zounds).
So “J “was another difficult letter to find a word or phrase for but it is the last one for which I have not found multiple candidates so hurry on but come back tomorrow…
However, we do have four examples of Cant (cryptolect, argot, pseudo-language, anti-language or secret language) from Wikipedia…
- Javanais, from France
- Jejemon, from the Philippines
- Jeringonza, from Spain
- Joual, from Quebec French