[Bell Historians] Syncopation

[Shaun Brown]

But that would be defining emphatic syncopation rather than rhythmic. 
In music today, offbeat emphasis is fairly ordinary, syncopation is
less ordinary

Syncopation	

where a silence or weak beat replaces the expected strong beat in a
bar, used extensively in the fourteenth century and again in the
twentieth

in jazz, the process of displacing 'expected' beats by anticipation or
delay of half a beat. The natural melodic accent which would fall, in
'square' music, on the beat, is thus heard on the off-beat. This adds
a flavor of ambiguity as to where the beat is