the post is gaslighting his own mom

> It’s that some of the folks who used to use it that way don’t remember that they did. When I asked my mom to define the word this week, she used the modern meaning, with no apparent recollection of her former firm conviction that a jerk was a dope, dodo, or dimwit. Did someone Neuralyze my mom,

No, they didn't. It's well documented the meaning was already changing in the 70s. "The Jerk" the movie might make it seem ambiguous but usage meaning "obnoxious/asshole" was common in the 70s and 80s. Dictionary defintions just mean they were out of date to common usage.

It doesn't help that you can warp the "idiot" meaning into the "obnoxious" meaning in the form of "If you'd stop being stupid you'd realize your being obnoxious".

> In fact, “the 1970s is when you start to see the obnoxious meaning really take off,” says Michael Adams, an English professor and specialist in lexicography at Indiana University Bloomington and the author of Slang: The People’s Poetry and other books about language. Not only was there “a rising use of ‘jerk,’” but there was also “the absolutely predictable development” of “compound forms like jerk ass, jerk face, jerk wad, jerk weed. … That is another reflection of the obnoxious meaning, and basically a generation of heavy slang users looking for a way not to sound like they come from the 1930s by using jerk in the traditional way of their parents and grandparents.” Martin, Adams notes, was in his mid-30s when The Jerk came out, old enough that in contrast to the kids on the cutting edge of jerk usage, he would have been “referring to an older use of the word.”

Bit of an stingy take. His mum may have been born in the 50s, and could reasonably be expected to have known the term prior to its change in usage.