Jackin' Jills

If your mind immediately went to the gutter when you read today’s title, you are certainly not alone. Language is fun, but also imperfect, and there can be multiple definitions for the same word, depending on the context.

Jacked is one of those words, and I wanted to have a little bit of fun with wordplay today. The title I’ve picked is a homophonic pun, kind of like a misheard lyric or mondegreen.

Jack and Jill went up a hill once. There’s a specific quirk here I’m taking advantage of: and and -ing both result in the same phoneme shortened to the same syllable. Here, we spell it as ‘n, but it could also be spelled as in’—both could be correct, so you need the context.

Here’s that context for three jackin’ (or jacked) people named Jill, all with life stories that illustrate their own meanings for jacked.

Jill Kinnmont Boothe was headed for the Olympics. At just 18 years old, she was a rising star in US skiing. Tragically, she suffered a crash while heading downhill on a particularly nasty slope in Utah.

Jill was really jacked up by the accident. She was left paralyzed from the neck down, and it’s hard for me to grasp how devastating that must have been for a kid whose world revolved around what they could do with their body. Thinking about the way jiu jitsu feels helps me visualize this a little bit, but our Jill was only 18 when this happened.

In fact, this is when Jill’s life became truly notable. She was able to pivot from the life of an elite athlete to that of a scholar and teacher, someone who helped others learn and advocated for children with disabilities. If you’re just a little older than me, you might have seen her life story on TV, The Other Side of the Mountain.

Jill Gascoine, by contrast, was straight up jacked. I don’t mean physically, like a power lifter or like Dink-Dink’s hind legs. I mean that she was a freakin’ boss on TV at a time when powerful, intelligent women were dramatically underrepresented.

The Gentle Touch aired during the early 80s in the UK, and it was the first British police drama to star a woman in the lead role. Gascoine showed independence and competence at a time when women just weren’t landing these sorts of roles on TV.

As a bonus, Jill Gascoine did most of her own stunts, so she not only jacked expectations for women on television, but she was also physically a little bit jacked too.

Jill Carroll completes our trifecta of Jackin’ Jills. On January 7th, 2006, her life as a reporter was twisted inside out and turned upside down when she was kidnapped in Iraq.

At the time, she was a freelance journalist reporting on the war in Iraq. After stints with The Wall Street Journal and The Jordan Times, she got a gig writing for the Christian Science Monitor.

In broad daylight in the middle of the morning, Jill’s car was jacked—hijacked, in this sense—and her driver-translator was dragged out of their car and immediately killed. As they had driven to interview a prominent Sunni Arab politician in a somewhat sketchy neighborhood, an organized group of presumed jihadist insurgents hatched the plot.

They held this valuable journalist hostage for three months, sharing videos with the media and turning her capture and imprisonment into an international news story. After her release, Jill Carroll published her tale in the Washington Post and in the Christian Science Monitor. Her stories tell about the diversity and complexity of her captors, and her own resilience shines through.

Three Jills, all jacked in different ways.

Do you know of any jackin’ (or jacked) Jills? Did I stretch the alliteration too far today? Is there a different sort of clever wordplay entering your brain today?