holy mackerel

Meme featuring a photo of Batman and Robin from the 1960s TV series with the caption “Holy minced oath, Batman!”

18 September 2024

“Holy mackerel” is what is called a minced oath, a phrase where an offensive term is replaced with a non-offensive one. In this case, turning a potentially blasphemous utterance into a silly or humorous one. There are a number of “holy X” ones: holy cow, holy Moses, and holy smoke being common. Most of these holy oaths date originate in nineteenth-century America.

I recall the Batman television series from the 1960s (the best Batman) where Robin, played by Burt Ward would utter at least one holy X phrase in each episode. Once when stuck in a vat of glue he uttered, “Holy mucilage, Batman!” And Holy X, Batman! has become something of an internet meme.

In the case of holy mackerel, the mackerel has no significance. Like cow, smoke, or mucilage, it’s just a word that defuses a blasphemous phrase. The choice of mackerel has nothing to do with Lenten diets or the slang word for pimp. Although the latter is related to April Fool’s Day as practiced in France, see April fool. And, by the way, slang use of mackerel for pimp has been part of English slang too, borrowed from the French, since the fifteenth century, although it's not very common in English use.

As to why holy mackerel came into use, it’s probably just a random formulation playing off its absurdity. Someone said it, people laughed, and it caught on. There are many such examples in slang. Language does not follow logical rules; it’s just what people make of it.

The earliest example of holy mackerel that I’ve been able to find is from New York’s Atlas newspaper of 30 January 1853; there are probably earlier ones:

“Holy mackerel!” wouldn’t we like to be a collector of assessments in the Street Department? If our friends, who have supplanted the old collectors, just in time to take this big pool, have many more such jobs to come, won’t they be rich, in three years!

Examples of holy oaths in Green’s Dictionary of Slang include holy balls, holy biddy, holy bones, holy catfish, holy cats, holy Christmas, Holy Christopher, holy cow, holy crap, holy cripes, holy crow, holy cuss, holy dooley (Australian), holy Egypt, holy fly, holy frost (Australian), holy fuck, holy fuckballs, (these last two stretch the definition of minced, but they’re not blasphemous, so I guess they count), holy gee, holy guacamole, holy hailstones, holy hell, holy James Street (Irish), holy Joe, holy mac, holy mackerel, holy mackinaw, holy moly (this one is also reduplicative), holy monkey, holy Moses, holy Peoria, holy poker, holy pretzel, holy shit (see holy fuck), holy smoke(s), holy snakes, holy sneaking Moses, and holy wars.

I’m sure this list just scratches the surface.

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Sources:

Green’s Dictionary of Slang, n.d., s.v. holy…! excl., holy mackerel!, excl.

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. holy, adj. & n.

“Street Department—Fat Jobs—Boring the Treasury with a Big Anger!” The Atlas (New York), 30 January 1853. 2/2. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Image credit: Dave Wilton, 2024, generated by imgflip.com.

technetium

Photo of a strip of gray metal in a sealed glass tube

A sample of technetium in a glass ampule

13 September 2024

Technetium is a chemical element with atomic number 43 and the symbol Tc. It is the lightest element with no stable isotopes and the first element to be artificially produced. The name comes from the Greek τεχνητός (technetos), meaning artificial.

Technetium is used as a tracer chemical in medical testing and as a standard for beta radiation emissions in equipment calibration. It is also used as a catalyst in some chemical reactions, but radiation safety limits this use.

A number of researchers in the nineteenth century claimed to have discovered element 43, but all were found to have been other elements. In 1908, Masataka Ogawa mistook element 75, now known as rhenium, for element 43. In 1925, Walter Noddack, Ida Noddack (née Tacke), and Otto Berg thought they had discovered it, dubbing it masurium, but were subsequently shown to be mistaken.

Finally, in 1937 Carlo Perrier and Emilio Segré definitively discovered element 43 by bombarding a sample of molybdenum with deuterium and neutrons. They announced their discovery in both an Italian journal and in a letter to the journal Nature but did not propose a name at the time. The naming would wait for some ten years. Segré, a Jew, was visiting the University of California, Berkeley in 1938 when Mussolini’s government passed antisemitic laws that barred him from university positions in his native Italy. He remained in the United States, eventually working on the Manhattan Project and becoming a U.S. citizen. Segré would share the award of the 1959 Nobel Prize in Physics for the discovery of the antiproton.

Following the war, Perrier and Segré proposed the name technetium in a 1946 letter to Nature, that was published the following January:

It seems appropriate now to give a name to this element, as suggested by Paneth, and we would like to propose the name of “technetium,” from the Greek τεχνητός, artificial, in recognition of the fact that technetium is the first artificially made element. The corresponding chemical symbol should be “Tc.”

Naturally occurring technetium, a product of fission of uranium ore, was discovered in 1961. But virtually all technetium in use today is artificially created.

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Sources:

Miśkowiec, Pawel. “Name Game: The Naming History of the Chemical Elements—Part 3—Rivalry of Scientists in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries.” Foundations of Chemistry, 12 November 2022. DOI: 10.1007/s10698-022-09452-9.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, September 2009, s.v. technetium, n.

Perrier, C., Segré, E. “Alcune proprieta chimiche dell’elemento 43.” Rendiconti, Reale Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei, 25, 1937, 723–730.

———. “Radioactive Isotopes of Element 43” (13 June 1937). Nature, 140, 31 July 1937, 193–94. DOI: 10.1038/140193b0.

———. “Technetium: the Element of Atomic Number 43” (29 November 1946). Nature, 159, 4 January 1947, 24. DOI: 10.1038/159024a0.

Photo credit: Marco Cardin, 2020, Wikimedia Commons, licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.

kibosh / put the kibosh on

Drawing of two women in 19th-century dress arguing on a city street; a crowd has gathered around them

Illustration from Dickens’s “Seven Dials” by George Cruikshank, 1839

11 September 2024

To put the kibosh on something means to stop or end it. There have been any number of proposed origins for the word and phrase, but only one of them has any substantial evidence to support it, and that is that kibosh come from the Turkish qirbach, or kurbash in its English spelling, a type of whip. This etymology was put forward in great detail by Gerald Cohen, Stephen Goranson, and Matthew Little in a 2018 monograph. While I find their argument convincing, the only thing that we can say with certainty about the origin is that the phrase first appears in the working-class slang of early nineteenth-century London.

What may be the first appearance of the phrase in print is a broadsheet ballad titled Penal Servitude, that dates to c. 1830. It “may be” the first because we don’t know for sure when the broadsheet was printed. It bears no date, but there are contextual clues within the poem that point to 1830, give or take a year or two, as the publication date. Only one copy of the broadsheet is known to exist, now housed in the National Library of Australia. The poem is a satirical take on the policy of transporting convicts to that continent, positing that life in the penal colony was better than being poor in London.

The relevant lines in the poem are:

There is one little dodge that I am thinking,
That would put your profession all to smash,
It would put on the kibosh like winking,
That is if they was to introduce the lash.

The that is in the fourth line can be read in two ways. One can read it as i.e., making the fourth line an explanation of the slang in the third; put on the kibosh would then mean to institute flogging as punishment. Reading the lines this way makes the poem strong evidence for the kurbash origin. The word kurbash is recorded in English usage by 1814, and the loss of the /r/ can be readily explained by the non-rhotic nature of the London dialect.

The second reading would be to take the that is as instrumental. The only way to stop crime, put the kibosh on it, would be to do what is in the next line, that is to institute flogging. This reading has the advantage of keeping the sense of the phrase consistent and is still viable if kurbash is not the origin. The date of the poem is also less relevant for this reading. It still works even if the poem is considerably later.

There are also later appearances of kibosh indicating that it refers to a whip. The Oxford English Dictionary has this one from the London newspaper The Standard of 27 November 1834. Although that dictionary lists this quotation under the present-day sense of putting a stop to something, it’s more likely referring to a metaphorical whip. It could also be referring to a parliamentary whip, although given who is speaking that sense would seem unlikely. The article is a transcript from a court proceeding, this one regarding two chimney sweeps who were fined for touting their services on the public streets:

Mr. Dyer.—It’s no satisfaction to me, I assure you, to put the law in force; but I am bound to do so, where an offence is proved.

Smith.—Vell, I dusta say as your case is werry right, but I must get a mouthful of grub somehow.

Mr. Dyer put the moderate fine of 1s. and costs on both defendants.

Ah, said Smith, as he went out of the office, it vos the “Vigs” vot passed this bill, and vot the Duck Vellington put the kibosh on ’em for, and sarve ’em right. It warnt nothin else than this here hact vot “floored” them.

The swapping of /v/ and /w/ is characteristic of working-class London dialect of the period. The sweep’s reference to the Whigs and the Duke of Wellington deserves some explanation. A week prior to this hearing King William IV had dismissed the Whig government, headed by William Lamb, the 2nd Viscount Melbourne, because the king did not like the Whig’s reform measures. The Tories, under the Arthur Wellesley, the 1st Duke of Wellington, briefly formed a government, but would lose in the general election the following January. This was the last time a British monarch dismissed a government because they personally disagreed with its policies.

Three days later, another paper, The Age, would give a fuller explanation of the political context of the sweep’s remark:

SWEEP OUT OF THE WHIGS.—Various have been the surmises, and numerous the versions of the reasons, why the KING kicked the Whigs out so unceremoniously. GROTE and EASTHOPE, in their dearly-purchased Chronicle, say one thing—Cupid PALMERSTON in his Globe says another—Mr. EDWARD WARBURTON WIGGETT, alias LISTON BULWER, in a brochure of more impertinences than one imagined he himself could string together, has his story upon “unquestionable authority,” &c. &c.; but which is the true one? None of them. The real cause of the “kiboshing” of the ex-Chancellor and his crew came out on Tuesday at Marlborough-street, before Mr. DYER. A chimney-sweep was convicted for having (according to the phraseology of this Whig Act) “hawked the streets”—upon which his Blackness remarked:—“It vos the Vigs vot passed this Bill, and what the Duke of VELLINGTON put the kibosh on ’em for, and sarve ’em right. It warnt nothing else than this here hact vot floored ‘em.”—Sooty is certainly a wiser man than WARBURTON WIGGETT, alias BULWER.

Then there is this transcript of a court proceeding from 15 May 1835 where kibosh certainly refers to a whip or instrument of beating:

The Lord Mayer—And was this because you were a naturalized Jew?

Myers—Please you, my lord. I an’t no such a thing; I am a real Jew, and I never was naturalized. They say so to rise the kibosh against me, and my vife, vot I was valking mid, vhen they comes down upon us. Ve goes reglar to the synagogue, and the gentlemen knows it.

[…]

The Lord Mayor—Can your husband swear that they struck him?

Myers—I don’t think I can swear; but they gets other Jews to give me the kibosh upon me, and its all the same to me which of the whole set struck me.

Another early, and far more famous, use of the phrase is by Charles Dickens in his 1835 “Seven Dials,” one of his Sketches by Boz. In that sketch, he describes an argument between two drunk, women that had drawn the attention of a small crowd. Put the kyebosh on in this instance is usually read to be the put-a-stop-to sense, but it can more sensibly be read to refer to a literal beating or flogging:

“What do you mean by hussies?” interrupts a champion of the other party, who has evinced a strong inclination throughout to get up a branch fight on her own account. (“Hoo-roa,” ejaculates a pot-boy in a parenthesis, “put the kyebosh on her Mary.”)

Seven Dials is a junction of seven streets in the Covent Garden neighborhood of London. At the time, it was also the center of London’s printing of broadsheet ballads, so there is a connection between the place and the Penal Servitude ballad. Some later editions change the word to kye-bosk, a fact that has tripped up some would-be etymologists. Kyebosh is the spelling in the earliest print versions. It’s hyphenated, kye-bosh, in the original printing, but there the word is broken up by a line break. Later printings have retained the hyphen, presumably because the word was unfamiliar to the printers.

The semantic progression would seem to be from the Turkish kurbash to kibosh meaning a literal whip, to it meaning metaphorical whip, and finally to the result of the whipping, that is an end to the undesirable activity.

But the kurbash origin is by no means generally accepted. The biggest problem with the kurbash origin is the change in pronunciation. While the dropping of the /r/ is readily explained, the vowel changes are not. Some argue that there is no plausible route for the Turkish word to make it into working-class London dialect, but the fact that kurbash is attested to in English some fifteen years earlier quashes this particular objection. Of the major dictionaries, only American Heritage gives any credence to Cohen, Goranson, and Little’s arguments. The OED gives the etymology of kibosh as “of unknown origin.” Merriam-Webster says it is “of unknown origin.” And etymologist David Gold has published an article arguing unconvincingly that Cohen, Goranson, and Little are incorrect.

Theirs isn’t the only proposed etymology, but the others have little or no evidence to support them. I’m not going to exhaustively list all of the proposals, but I will briefly discuss and dismiss three of the most prominent ones.

Perhaps the most commonly touted explanation for the phrase is that it’s from the Irish caipín báis (death cap), referring either to the black cap used by a judge when pronouncing a death sentence or, more gruesomely, to burning pitch poured onto the heads of captured Irish insurgents by the English. But evidently, other than as the name of the poisonous mushroom, this Irish phrase doesn’t exist outside of proposed etymologies for kibosh.

Also often suggested is that it is from the Hebrew chi (eighteen) + bosh (variation and clipping of poshet, penny), eighteen pence signifying something of little value. But there is no evidence of any Hebrew or Jewish connection to the word, which arises in working-class, London slang, nor is there any explanation for how a word meaning small came to refer to ending or stopping something. (One of the early citations is from the speech of a Jewish man, but other uses from the period are not.)

Finally, more plausible but still lacking evidence, is the suggestion that it comes from ki- (emphatic syllable) + bosh (nonsense, stuff). But again, the semantic shift is unexplained.

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Sources:

American Heritage Dictionary, fifth edition, 2022, s.v. kibosh, n.

Cohen, Gerald, Stephen Goranson, and Matthew Little. Origin of Kibosh. Routledge Studies in Etymology. London: Routledge, 2018.

Cohen, Gerald Leonard, Matthew Little, and Stephen Goranson. “Revisit to Kibosh—Rejecting the Irish ‘Cap-of-Death’ Etymology.” Comments on Etymology, 49.5, February 2020, 2–12. Missouri University of Science and Technology: Scholars’ Mine.

Dickens, Charles (pseud. Boz). “Scenes and Characters.—No. 1. Seven Dials.” Bells Life in London and Sporting Chronicle, 27 September 1835, 1/1. NewspaperArchive.com.

Gold, David L. “So Far, No Solid Evidence for *English kibosh < Arabic krb’ğ.” Leuvensche Bijdragen, 104, 2022, 188–257.

Green’s Dictionary of Slang, n.d., s.v. kibosh v., kibosh, n.

Liberman, Anatoly. “Unable to Put the Kibosh on a Hard Word.” OUPblog, 19 May 2010.

Merriam-Webster.com, 28 July 2024, s.v. kibosh, n.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, December 2019, s.v. kibosh, v., kibosh, n.; second edition, 1989, s.v. kurbash, n.

“Police.” The Standard (London), 27 November 1834, 4/2. Gale Primary Sources: British Library Newspapers.

“Police Intelligence. Mansion-House.” True Sun (London), 15 May 1835, 4/4. NewspaperArchive.com.

Quinion, Michael. “Putting the Kibosh on It.” World Wide Words, 27 March 2016.

“Sweep Out of the Whigs.” The Age (London), 30 November 1834, 382/3. Gale Primary Sources: Nineteenth Century UK Periodicals.

Image credit: George Cruikshank, 1839. Wellcome Collection. Public domain image.

hotshot

B&W photo of a quartet of musicians posing as if playing before a radio microphone, a bearded man is dancing on the left

1935 publicity photo of the Hoosier Hot Shots musical quartet for NBC’s National Barn Dance radio program (which was a forerunner of the more famous Grand Ole Opry); the character of Uncle Ezra, played by Pat Barnett, is on the left

9 September 2024

Perhaps the most common sense of hotshot today is that of a very capable person, especially one who is brash and flashy, but the word has had a variety of meanings over the centuries. The underlying metaphor underneath all the senses, however, is that of a bullet, warm from having been fired.

Hotshot first appears at the close of the sixteenth century in the sense of a reckless person. We see it in George Peele’s 1593 The Famous Chronicle of King Edward the First, when it is used in the context of someone whose courage in battle comes out of a bottle:

Friar. Come boie we must buckle I see,
The prince is of my profession right:
Rather than he wil lose his wenche,
He will fight Ab ouo vsque ad mala.

Nouice. O maister doubt you not but your Nouice will prooue a whot shot, with a bottle of Metheglin.

(Ab ovo usque ad mala literally means “from egg to fruit,” a metaphorical reference to dinner courses, equivalent to our present-day from soup to nuts; the locus classicus is Horace’s Satire 3. Metheglin is a variety of spiced mead, a word borrowed from Welsh.)

But at about the same time, appearing in print a few years after Peele’s Chronicle, the term is used to refer to a skilled lover. We see it in John Marston’s play The Malcontent, published in 1604:

Bili[oso]. Mary my good Lord quoth hee, your Lordship shall euer finde amongst a hundred French-men, fortie hot shottes: amongst a hundred Spaniardes, threescore bragarts: amongst a hundred Dutch-men, fourescore drunkardes: amongst a hundred English-men, fourescore and ten mad-men: and amongst an hundred Welch-men.

Bian[ca]. What my Lord?

Bili. Fourescore and nineteene gentlemen.

This sexual sense could be applied regardless of the person’s gender. This sense, however, fell out of use by the end of the seventeenth century. We see it again in the twentieth, but this later incarnation is undoubtedly a specific application of the more general one of a capable person that we’re familiar with today.

The capable-person sense is in place by the 1920s. Here’s an example from the Atlanta Journal of 4 February 1921:

Speaking of Mr. Ladue, this lively gentleman hails from Colgate university. His first name is Frederick, he being named after either Frederick the Great, Frederick the Saxon or Fred Fulton, I forget which. However that may be, he is a hot shot as a referee, and it is a delight to watch him run off a game. You never saw a fast basketball game until you see Mr. Ladue referee one. He demands an absolutely clean game with personal contact at a minimum.

There are undoubtedly earlier examples of this sense to be found, but it’s difficult to differentiate this sense from that of a literal heated bullet or the metaphorical and rhetorical equivalent. This literal sense of hot shot comes from the practice of heating cannon projectiles prior to firing in order to turn them into incendiary rounds. Such use could be particularly devastating in naval battles. This gunnery sense is recorded by 1666 when it appears in an anonymous poem about the death of Admiral Christopher Myngs from wounds he received in the Second Anglo-Dutch War:

No sooner had the black-mouth’d Ord’nance    (hot
With Hell-bred Flames, and big with Flemmish   shot)
Spit forth its Venim’d blasts, enough to make
The well compacted Universe to shake,
But straight the Waves (supposing thou wert dead)
Leapt up to catch the Airie Substance fled.

On the page, the parenthetical hot shot is split between the two lines. Grammatically it must be the subject of the adjective Flemmish, but to make the rhyme scheme work, hot and shot must be at the end of the two respective lines.

This literal gunnery sense is not the origin of the earlier capable-person sense, but both stem from a metaphor of a hot bullet. We do, however, see a metaphorical use of the literal gunnery sense to mean an barbed rhetorical utterance. Playwright Aphra Behn uses this metaphorical sense in her 1681 The Second Part of the Rover. The passage in question is an exchange between the title character and a Spanish courtesan who is in love with him:

Will[more]. My fair false Sybil, what Inspirations are you waiting from Heav’n, new Arts to cheat Mankind!—tell me, with what face canst thou be Devout, or ask any thing from thence who hast made so lewd a use of what it has already lavisht on thee?

La Nu[uche]. Oh my careless Rover! I perceive all your hot shot is not yet spent in Battel, you have a Volley in reserve for me still—Faith, Officer, the Town has wanted mirth in your absence.

This rhetorical sense of a barbed verbal volley remains in use today.

I’m not going to detail all the different senses of hot shot, but another one that is notable is that of dose of heroin or other drug that has been laced with poison. This sense is in place by 1936, when it is recorded in a glossary of underworld slang in the journal American Speech:

HOT SHOT. Cyanide or other fast-working poison concealed in dope to do away with a dangerous or troublesome addict. The hot shot kills the addict, in contrast to flipping him or taking him [i.e., rendering unconscious].

Sources:

Behn, Aphra. The Second Part of the Rover. London: Jacob Tonson, 1681, 13. ProQuest: Early English Books Online.

Blake, Morgan. “Eddie Rawson Brilliant Hero in Red and Black’s Victory over Commodores.” Atlanta Journal (Georgia), 4 February 1921, 24/4. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Green’s Dictionary of Slang, n.d., s.v. hot-shot, n.

Horace. Satire 3, lines 6–7. In Horace. Satires. Epistles. The Art of Poetry. H. R. Fairclough, trans. Loeb Classical Library 194. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1926, 32–33. Loeb Classical Library Online.

Marston, John (with additions by John Webster). The Malcontent. London: Valentine Simmes for William Aspley, 1604, sig. E3r. ProQuest: Early English Books Online.

Maurer, David W. “The Argot of the Underworld Narcotic Addict.” American Speech, 11.2 (April 1936), 116–27 at 122/2. JSTOR.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, December 2008, s.v. hotshot, n.

Peele, George. The Famous Chronicle of King Edward the First. London: Abell Jeffes, 1593, sig. C3v. ProQuest: Early English Books Online.

“Upon the Death of the Truly Valiant and Magnanimous Sr. Christoph. Minns Wounded at Sea.” Oxford: Joseph Godwin, 1666. ProQuest: Early English Books Online.

Photo credit: Kaufman-Fabry, Chicago, photographers for NBC Radio, 1935. Wikimedia Commons. Public domain photo.