How did the insult "jerk" come about?

Answer 1

From 16th century, when the pit stops the old steam engine trains needed to make to "jerk" water to the train, to bring it from the river to the train. The term "jerkwater" came to represent any small, remote town. The term "jerk" was then derived from these towns to represent inferior, unimportant people.

Answer 2

The first senses of jerk in English had to do with whips: "To the manne...foure score ierkes or lasshes with a skourge" (W. Watreman, The Fardle of Facion, 1555) and "Than he beateth and gierketh us a little with a rod" (Coverdale, A Spyrytuell and Most Precious Pearle, 1550) The modern noun sense 'a quick, sharp pull, thrust, twist, or throw' and the verb sense 'to move with a quick, sharp motion' both evolved late in the 16th century.

The word's origin is uncertain. The OED suggests that it might be onomatopoetic, imitating the sound of a lashing whip. The other possibility, proposed in Random House Webster's Unabridged Dictionary, is that jerk is a dialectal variant of yerk, a shoemaker's term meaning 'to draw stitches tight', making the shoes ready to wear. That word comes from Old English gearcian 'to make ready'.

Jerk meant 'a short witty speech' from Shakespeare's time until the late 19th century: "Smelling out the odoriferous flowers of fancy, the jerkes of invention" (Love's Labor's Lost). In the 1960s and '70s, jerk was the name of a dance.

The slang term jerk meaning 'a stupid person' first appeared in 1919, according to the Random House Historical Dictionary of American Slang, and became popular in the 1930s, when it was glossed in the American Mercury as 'eccentric fellow; fool'. It is a shortened form of jerkwater, which, in the 19th century, was a remote station where a locomotive had to "jerk" water from a water tower to fill its tender. The word came to mean 'a train or stagecoach serving a remote area' or 'a small remote town'. The adjective jerkwater meant, and still means, 'provincial' or 'insignificant'.

Jerk meaning 'to preserve' is a back formation from jerky 'meat that has been cut in strips and dried in the sun' and comes from the Spanish word charqui describing meat preserved in this way. The word is first attested in the late 18th century.

Answer 3

Probably from someone "jerking your chain," referring to jerking a dog's chain which is very disturbing to the dog.