Yes, I too was deeply disappointed. I believe you could do an entire PhD dissertation of deconstruction of the semitoic meaning of why j is lower case in jQuery. Is it symbolic of humankind's struggle against our basic instinct to organically generate hierarchical structures to subvert understanding of true meaning?
Hilarious. :) I hope that's how you meant it.
Nice one :D
jQuery popularized use of CSS selectors in clients, and probably had a role in browser vendors adding querySelectorAll.
implicit iteration (obviating for-loops) across a node-set, type-agnostic starting points (constructor accepts a snippet of HTML, a selector, a node or another jQuery object), and simple chaining (functions return 'this') enable concise code
on top of this it smooths out DOM API inconsistencies and quirks between browsers
A deconstruction would look more at things like subconscious signaling, cultural values and biological influences. For a funny play on the less interesting distractions that a lot of deconstructionists of the last century embarrassed themselves with see dugmartin's comment above, I was trying to lean away from that school by using the word semiotic, but dugmartin expertly nailed that too :)
Problem is those always erupt into flame wars, people don't like being deconstructed, I wish it wasn't so hard, self awareness is a good thing, even if the deconstruction is a leaky abstraction as generalizations are.
Then again, we do have Yegge ;-)