Jackpot
JACKPOT, n. I mostly associate this noun with winning the lottery—hitting the jackpot—but it actually comes from poker, which isn’t too surprising. It originally referred to a pot, or a collective pool of money, into which players would contribute until one of them could open the betting with a pair of jacks or higher. It can take a long time for a good hand to emerge from a deck of cards, so the pool of money could get big.
Paul Cézanne, The Card Players, 1894-5, sourced from Wikipedia
“Jackpot” exited the context of poker and became any large amount of money, usually one held in reserve. The poker sense is not in use these days, but it did give rise to another metaphorical usage of “jackpot,” a North American one where to be “in the jackpot” is to be in trouble or any kind of difficult situation—poker games are hard to get out of—or to be arrested or in jail.
Despite being a North American, I had never heard anyone say “in the jackpot” like this until twitter brought to my attention a video of a baseball umpire saying the phrase “[your] ass in the jackpot,” which was one of those wonderful moments where you listen to a person who is ostensibly speaking the same language as you, and you recognize each individual word, but still have absolutely no idea what they mean. I don’t know anything about baseball, but I couldn’t let this expression go un-looked-up.
Deadspin helpfully explains and provides the history of “in the jackpot” here. As with anything that delves into the history of the United States, one story here turns out to involve slavery: slave owners playing poker, trading the lives of enslaved human beings, people who were quite literally “in the jackpot”—part of the poker game’s winnings—but also figuratively “in the jackpot,” in a difficult situation that they could not escape. I don’t know if these anecdotes are the origin for the expression or just an appallingly memorable example of its usage, but either way, I don’t feel much like putting this expression back into common conversation.
This week in small-r romance, I am still in the middle of Alyssa Cole’s How to Find a Princess (lesbian f/pan f, both cis, contemporary) and I don’t normally review books before finishing them, but this newsletter is about to go on a short break and I need to tell you about how delightfully funny, sexy, and wonderful this book is right now. It is urgent. This is the sapphic romance you have been waiting for. My internal monologue while reading is just one long elated shriek. There are two fantastic grandmas as supporting characters, one raunchy and one cranky, and I love them both. And most of all I love single-minded, extraordinarily determined agent of chaos Beznaria Chetchevaliere with her suits and her biceps and her smudgy glasses and single-minded, extraordinarily determined agent of order Makeda Hicks with her pineapple-print Hawaiian shirts and her incredible organizational competence. It’s hot as fuck and where I am in the book, they haven’t even fully kissed yet. Alyssa Cole’s worldbuilding for her fictional countries continues to be impeccable: this one is a sort of faux-Maltese Mediterranean island founded by a pirate queen who fought her way out of slavery. Also there is a British character whose last name is “Shropsbottomshireburrough, pronounced Smith,” which startled a genuine lol out of me. One last note on this book: the cover features two gorgeous Black women in an embrace and not only is it so cool and meaningful to see photos of it stocked on the shelves of big stores like Target, but also the story of how it came about, detailed in Alyssa Cole’s newsletter, is kind of a pandemic miracle! Sorry, no content warnings because I’m not finished reading yet.
And in romance-adjacent books, I read The Clockwork Boys and The Wonder Engine by T. Kingfisher, which are really just like one long book, and that book is an epic journey through a war-torn fantasy land full of magic, and naturally there is a ragtag band of lovable characters, and also two of them—a small, fierce forger/thief and a large, sad paladin—fall in love. And there are sentient, talking badger-like creatures called gnoles, and I would die for them. A great time. Content warnings: violence, murder, torture, a little bit of sex.
This is the one-hundredth issue of Word Suitcase and the two-year anniversary. Thanks for being here, whether you arrived yesterday or back in June 2019!
Some of my favorites from Year II:
An epistle (epistolary novels, romance novels, and a selection of links; July 12, 2020)
Mean as a suck-egg weasel (duplicitousness, defamation, heroic warrior mice; October 4, 2020)
Window undressing (on romance novels and interior design; November 29, 2020)
To have the horn (horns, hands, figs, romance novels, a lot of talk about penises and a little about vulvas; December 13, 2020)
Furbelows and dandies (how to look your best throughout history (plus, as always, romance novels); February 21, 2021)
I love writing these and hearing from you all and am excited to start Year III. I’m taking a little break and will be back in July.
