By Anatoly Liberman
The young Dickens was the first to record the word kibosh. We don’t know for sure how it sounded in the 1830’s, but, judging by the spelling ky(e)-, it must always have been pronounced with long i. The main 19th-century English etymologists (Eduard Mueller, Hensleigh Wedgwood, and Walter W. Skeat) did not include kibosh in their dictionaries. They probably had nothing to say about it, though Mueller, a German, hardly ever saw such a rare and insignificant word. Even in Webster it appeared only at the beginning of the 20th century and, as far as its etymology is concerned, was given short (very short) shrift: “Slang.” Suggestions concerning the origin of kibosh kept turning up in the popular press, but they were too fanciful to satisfy anybody. Dickens wrote the following in Sketches by Boz (“Seven Dials”): “‘What do you mean by hussies?’ interrupted a champion of the other party, who has evinced a strong inclination to get up a branch fight on her own account. (‘Hooroar,’ ejaculates a pot-boy in parenthesis, ‘put the kyebosk [sic] on her, Mary!) ‘What do you mean by hussies?’ reiterated the champion.” (In those innocent days, when one could have intercourse with one’s neighbors, ejaculate meant “exclaim.”) This passage has been reproduced in many works dealing with kibosh.
In 1901, discussion on kibosh resurfaced, and the following explanation, by M. D. Davis became widely known: “…English slang is indebted to these synagogues for another peculiar term, kybosh, signifying a trifling affair, a matter of no moment. The evolution of the word would puzzle a Skeat. Originally it meant eighteenpence, a trifling amount. It is still used in that sense. It consists of two words, the guttural chi = eighteen, and bosh = penny….The Hebrew for penny is poshet, abbreviated into posh, afterwards bosh. Consequently, kybosh is eighteenpence good in Jewish affairs, something of no value in ordinary transactions.” Regardless of a Skeat, the Skeat must have been irritated by this note, but in the absence of a valid proposal, he preferred to keep silent (a rare case in his life). One need not have Skeat’s perspicacity or be a specialist in Hebrew to see how weak Davis’s etymology is. When the name of a small coin is used to characterize a meager quantity, words like penny and farthing come up. Would anyone think of eighteenpence as the embodiment of smallness? And how could a word meaning “trifle” become part of an idiom for “finish off” (with the definite article before it)? Davis did not say that a similar idiom existed in Hebrew or that chibosh means “a trifle” in that language. According to him, “kybosh is eighteenpence good in Jewish affairs,” whatever that means. Incidentally, eighteen pence was not such a small sum in the early part of the 19th century.
The OED had no enthusiasm for Davis’s hypothesis and said only: “Origin obscure. (It has been stated to be Yiddish or Anglo-Hebrew),” with reference to the article quoted above. So far, that entry has not been modified. In addition to the phrase put the kibosh on, kibosh has been recorded with the meanings “nonsense, humbug,” “the proper style or fashion ‘the thing’” (as in the proper kibosh, the correct kibosh), and, surprisingly, “Portland cement.” Unless put the kibosh on arose as an alteration of some foreign idiom, we must assume that kibosh, a separate word, existed before the long phrase. It is hard to imagine that kibosh “stop” (noun), kibosh “nonsense,” kibosh “the proper thing,” let alone kibosh “Portland cement,” are four etymologically distinct words. So what was the proto-kibosh? Was it “nonsense”?
Charles P. G. Scott, the