Main Line Native Pens Essay On 'Jawn' For College Magazine

A Main Line native who is attending school at Colorado College in Colorado Springs is helping clue his mountain-region colleagues in to a unique linguistic feature only found in the Philadelphia area.

Jason Edelstein is a Lower Merion Township native and penned an essay on the unique Phlly word "jawn."

Cipher, Colorado College's student magazine, published an essay from Edelstein, who is a creative writing major in the school's english department, on the word that is unique to our area.

Titled "Infinite Jawn: What to do with a word that can mean anything," the essay goes into the history of jawn, how it spread to suburbs, how race affected the word, and more.

Edelstein's essay is well researched, well written, and a very interesting read for those both familiar and unfamiliar with the regional term.

It's not a long read but covers enough ground to be a substantial piece of great linguistic work.

You can read Edelstein's jawn on the Cipher website here.

Jawn was recently featured as a Merriam Webster "word to watch" and added to the Oxford Living Dictionary which is considered the one of the most inclusive English-language dictionaries.

City Hall in Philadelphia is seen, Wednesday, Oct. 18, 2017. The cities of Philadelphia and Pittsburgh are both attempting to woo Amazon to build its second headquarters in Pennsylvania. (AP Photo/Matt Rourke)