You can pass anything as a function argument. And in JavaScript, you can pass any argument to any function, even this argument is not declared, the only problem is what this function does. It has nothing to do with jQuery.
As to using "this"… This feature is very important but almost irrelevant to your problem. It's just the implicit function argument passed to a JavaScript function. What it references depends on the context, but it similar but not exactly the same as "this" in traditional OOP languages, in particular, because functions in JavaScript are
first-class citizen objects. Please see:
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Reference/Operators/this[
^].
See also:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-class_citizen[
^].
As to your particular problem, it seems artificial to me; you just need to learn a bit more of general programming and JavaScript programming, not specifically jQuery. If you provide more detail, we can discuss more detailed solutions.
—SA