“Maybe he should chug on over to mamby-pamby land.”
Love that commercial but just what is a jackwagon?
It's a jackass. I guess Geico just didn't want to say it on TV.
Rep. Anthony Weiner is a jackwagon
A jackwagon was the last wagon in a wagon train, where the cooks worked, the mess wagon.
The politically correct way to say "Jackass" on a TV commercial?
n. Slang term derived from the Freight or Chow wagons used in the late 19th century. These were often the last wagons in a wagon train, making them the least favorable to drive due to the dust, waste, and debris from the front of the train.
When used as in insult it refers to one’s lack of intelligence, implying the insultee is capable of no more than operating a Chow wagon.
1. From the old west wagon train Era. It refers to the Freight or Chow wagons that were pulled by Mules. Jack are male Jenny are female mules.Usually the slowest wagon in the wagon train. It was at the back of the wagon train. One of the worst jobs being in the rear eating the dust and smell of all the wagons and livestock ahead of you. This term was used to refer to you as being slow or only capable of the worst job available.
Originally a “Jack Wagon” was simply a large, specialized wagon that hauled the massive manual jacks used back when logging was done mostly by hand. The trees were raised slightly by these jacks to allow cutting into more managable sizes for transport from remote forest locations. Over time, with the introduction modern mechanized equipment (e.g. large “Bobcat”-type vehicles, etc), the need for these heavy hand cranked jacks disappeared. Spotting a “Jack Wagon” at a logging site came to mean you had found a crew that was seriously behind the times and out of touch with getting the job done.
“When WWII broke out and logging camps were cleared out by the draft, this term was applied by these former loggers / new recruits to the seriously out-dated equipment the US military entered the war with. Many units were initially fielded with WWI-era rifles and artillery. The term “jackwagon” (reduced to one word) found a quick home with these troops and spread to become a general term for anything out-dated or out-of-touch with surrounding reality.
But it wasn’t until Congress decided to make the military more “user-friendly” and “kind” in the post-Vietnam ’70s that the term spread to describing people. When cursing and swearing at recruits was banned, drill instructors (DI’s) had to find a new vocabulary to get their very loud message across. And one of the terms appropriated was “jackwagon”, meaning a recruit who was not focused on reality, the here and now or the requirements of the job at hand.