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Time for another week of marching down the alphabet from Green’s Dictionary of Slang, starting this installment with K:
kibosh (ki-BOSH) also kabosh, kiebosh, and kybosh (KAY-bosh) - n., a bad accident, a defeat.
Or as modern dictionaries put it, something which checks, restrains, or stops -- and since it first appeared, the set phrase is almost always "put the kibosh on". First used in the early 1830s, though despite earlier claims Dickens did not set down its the first appearance in print, as it showed up in newspapers in the year before Sketches by Boz. In the mid-19th century there was also a secondary sense of "nonsense," which is undoubtedly an alteration of bosh, which also appeared around that time, an import from Turkish thanks to James Justinian Morier’s Ayesha (1834), but that sense vanished in the early 20th century. Origin is entirely obscure -- it is certainly not Yiddish, though it is frequently speculated and I'd always assumed, as there's no Yiddish word at all like it. Wiktionary has a good summary of possibilities.
Bonus word: kingsman (for "handkerchief" read "neckcloth")
---L.
kibosh (ki-BOSH) also kabosh, kiebosh, and kybosh (KAY-bosh) - n., a bad accident, a defeat.
Or as modern dictionaries put it, something which checks, restrains, or stops -- and since it first appeared, the set phrase is almost always "put the kibosh on". First used in the early 1830s, though despite earlier claims Dickens did not set down its the first appearance in print, as it showed up in newspapers in the year before Sketches by Boz. In the mid-19th century there was also a secondary sense of "nonsense," which is undoubtedly an alteration of bosh, which also appeared around that time, an import from Turkish thanks to James Justinian Morier’s Ayesha (1834), but that sense vanished in the early 20th century. Origin is entirely obscure -- it is certainly not Yiddish, though it is frequently speculated and I'd always assumed, as there's no Yiddish word at all like it. Wiktionary has a good summary of possibilities.
Bonus word: kingsman (for "handkerchief" read "neckcloth")
---L.
