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Document Details : Title: So Far, No Solid Evidence for *English kibosh < Arabic krb'ğ Author(s): GOLD, David L. Journal: Leuvense Bijdragen - Leuven Contributions in Linguistics and Philology Volume: 104 Date: 2022-2023 Pages: 188-257 DOI: 10.2143/LB.104.0.3293187 Abstract : The origin and the original meaning of the English noun kibosh (variously spelled and now occurring always or almost always in the semantically bleached idiom put the kibosh on [+ noun phrase ~ pronoun] ‘put a definitive end to’, as in 'The pandemic put the kibosh on their plans for a cruise around the world', or ‘thwart’, as in 'In the end, the Allies finally put the kibosh on Hitler' have intrigued people since at least the 1870s and a number of etymologies have been suggested, but none has ever been demonstrated to be indisputably right. In their book Origin of Kibosh, published in 2017, Gerald Cohen, Stephen Goranson, and Matthew Little claimed to have proven that (1) kibosh is an immediate reflex of the regional Arabic noun krb'ğ ‘certain kind of whip’ and (2) that was the original meaning of the English word. Since their book (of 172 pages) was far longer than all the previously published remarks on the word combined, it gained widespread attention in Anglophonia and the compilers of at least two dictionaries cautiously adopted the authors’ etymology (each dictionary, in a form somewhat different from the other’s and from the authors’). Believing that quantity is a sure measure of quality and therefore of accuracy, certain 'reviewers' were impressed by the length of the book but did not read it closely enough to become aware of its authors’ serious misinterpretations, their glaring omissions, their repeated lack of interest in delving, their readiness to permit themselves an overflow of unproven, suppositions which they thought constituted a well-argued etymology, and their other mistakes, large and small, of omission and commission. The present analysis, by no means exhaustive, is the first treatment of the book in depth and in breadth. It takes a magnifying glass to the authors’ six exhibits for English kibosh *‘certain kind of whip’ or *‘whip’ and shows that two do not contain kibosh in that sense (exhibits D and F); one likely contains the Swahili noun kiboko ‘sjambok’ partly misrecorded or partly misprinted as kibosh presumably as a result of paronymic attraction (Exhibit E); one, being vaguely phrased, contains the word in a sense that now and maybe forever cannot be specified (Exhibit B); in another, the word has a remote chance of meaning *‘certain kind of whip’ or *‘whip’ (Exhibit C); and in a third, the word has a chance of so meaning (Exhibit A). Thus, despite intensive searching on the World-Wide Web, the authors put into evidence not a single irrefutable attestation of kibosh designating any kind of whip or meaning *‘whip’ in general (as in, say, *“The boatswain’s mate took a kibosh and flogged the cadet until he had welts all over his back”). Although they claimed that the Arabic word entered English through the spoken channel, they categorically refused to try to determine whether their etymology was phonologically plausible, and although they suggested a few chains of transmission to explain how that word got from [Lower Egyptian?] Arabic to basilectal London English, where English kibosh was present by 25 November 1834, they offered not even weak evidence, let alone irrefutable evidence, for any of the links in the chains. The foregoing notwithstanding, the authors’ etymology of kibosh could be right, in which case they did not prove that it is. |
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