On a recent mini-binge of James M. Cain novels, I finished a 5-in-1 set from Picador: two I’d read years ago – The Postman Always Rings Twice, Double Indemnity – and three others I soon raced through: Serenade, Mildred Pierce, and The Butterfly.

Cain, in a preface to The Butterfly, reacts to some criticisms of his work, such as that he took his style from Hammett (‘I have read less than twenty pages of Mr Dashiell Hammett in my whole life’).* A blurb from the NYRB hints at his formidable legacy: ‘It is no accident that movies based on three of them helped to define the genre known as film noir: or that Camus used Postman as his model for L’Étranger.’

But the purpose of this post is to examine the vivid verb used, and mentioned, in the title. About midway through The Butterfly, a character’s unexpected appearance prompts the following exchange:

‘Jess, what is she doing here?’

‘It’s got me buffaloed.’

We can safely infer the meaning of buffalo (v.) here as synonymous with stumped or perplexed. But the word has a range of subtly related senses that come from our perceptions of the animal’s nature. The OED defines it as North American slang meaning ‘to overpower, overawe, or constrain by superior force or influence; to outwit, perplex’. Its first citation is from the Cincinnati Enquirer, 1903.

The ‘perplex’ sense is apparent also in William Raine’s Bucky O’Connor (1910): ‘O’Connor admitted that he was “buffaloed” when he attempted an analysis of his unusual feeling.’ Clarence Mulford’s Coming of Cassidy (1913) offers the ‘overpower, intimidate’ sense: ‘It ain’t his fault that Waffles buffaloed you fellers out of th’ Hills, is it?’

Green’s Dictionary of Slang defines buffalo similarly, as ‘to overawe, to frighten, to confuse, to pressurize, to threaten’, and supplies an older first citation (1878–79) and a broader selection of subsequent examples, though note the exclusively US sources:

This helps unlock the linguistically infamous sentence

Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo

which despite appearances is grammatical and meaningful. Along with the ‘bully, threaten’ sense of buffalo (v.), at #5 and #6, it also contains the noun buffalo and the place name Buffalo. Wikipedia helpfully recasts it: Buffalo from Buffalo that other buffalo from Buffalo bully [themselves] bully buffalo from Buffalo. Still buffaloed?

*

* That’s right: less than twenty. Nothing wrong with it.

Like has undergone radical developments in modern English. It can function as a hedge (‘I’ll be there in like an hour’), a discourse particle (‘This like serves a pragmatic function’), and a sentence adverb (‘It’s common in Ireland, like’). These and other non-standard usages are frequently criticised, but they’re probably older than critics think.

More recent is the so-called quotative like (‘I’m like, Whoa!’), also often disparaged. This became widely established impressively fast and is leading to some remarkable usages in younger generations: children saying things like ‘What’s Ernie like?’ to mean ‘What’s Ernie saying?’

So some uses of like are emerging right now, spreading through younger speech communities. In episode 278 of Australia’s Talk the Talk podcast, guest Alexandra D’Arcy – a linguistics professor who literally wrote the book on like – says that while she might say ‘at like the same time’, her son can say ‘at the like same time’, which is not in her grammar at all. It’s a subtle but striking difference.

It gets better. The latest novel use to which like is being put is as an infix. Infixes are a pretty small set in English, so a new one is a genuine surprise, linguistically. In some ways it is unlikeprecedented.

A quick side note: An infix is an affix that occurs inside a root or stem – unlike a prefix or suffix, which occur before (unfair) or after it (development). Infixes are common in some languages, but in English they’re marginal, occurring in a few compound plurals (passers-by, cupsful), hip-hop lingo (hizouse), Simpsons-ese (saxomaphone, scrum-diddly-umptious), and expletive infixation (abso-bloody-lutely) – though here the insert is not an affix, so some would categorise this as tmesis. See this work by Alan Yu (PDF) for cross-linguistic detail.

Like now joins the limited club of English infixes. This re-like-markable innovation seems to have been around for a couple of decades at least (see below), but it came to my attention only recently, through The Vocal Fries, a podcast about linguistic discrimination. Episode 21 features (guess who!) Alexandra D’Arcy, who, around 23 minutes in, discusses the different roles of like and says:

And now there’s an infix. Right? So you can get—I can’t do it, it’s not part [of my grammar], it’s too new for me. This one’s genuinely new, but younger speakers can say things [like] ‘un-like-believable’. Right? ‘She’s un-like-sympathetic’…

Some examples:

Certain words are more amenable than others to like­-infixation, for both semantic and morphosyntactic reasons. Forever forming for like ever is a particularly common construction (it even features in a popular print), with ever sometimes typed in all caps (for like EVER) to like add to the user’s expressive style.

Browsing Twitter suggests it’s pretty much all younger people using it, mostly young women – ever in the vanguard of linguistic change – but a fair number of young men too. The 1.9-billion-word GloWbE corpus has 11 examples, while the new, 14-billion-word iWeb corpus has 74, including the following:

Most of the corpus examples are from the last 10 years, but the oldest I found is from c.1998, in the Never Been Kissed screenplay, revised draft by Jenny Bicks, based on Abby Kohn and Marc Silverstein’s original script:

O.K., what have you wanted for like ever but you didn’t think it would – ever happen?

With more research, that can probably be antedated. Point is, this is new and fun and interesting, like is unlikestoppable, and its evolution is in-like-evitable. Within a generation it’ll feel like like has been an infix for like ever.

Updates:

More discussion at 3 Quarks Daily, Language Hat, Sensible Endowment.

Sometimes the universe hints strongly at what I should write about. Recently I read two books in close succession that featured the same curious slang word, used in different ways and worth a quick study. For one thing, it’s not just a word but a number: 86.

First there was Merritt Tierce’s fierce first novel Love Me Back. Its narrator, who works in a restaurant, says:

Later that day I am in the wine cellar updating the eighty-sixed list when the Bishop’s handler comes by.

Then I read Alison Bechdel’s brilliant comic memoir Fun Home, which shows another usage of 86 and a speculative origin story – but is it true? (Click images to embiggen.)

The etymology of 86 is uncertain, but it probably emerged as waiters’ and bartenders’ slang in the 1920s–1930s. Some authorities suggest that it’s rhyming slang for nix, a word of Germanic origin, but that doesn’t explain why it’s not, say, 36 or 96.

Still, this is the general route offered, with varying degrees of certainty, by GDoS, AHD, M-W, ODO, and the OED. Michael Quinion mentions a few other routes. The dictionary depicted in Bechdel’s comic, incidentally, is the 1951 first edition of Webster’s New World Dictionary, I think.

The OED’s first recorded use of slang eighty-six, in 1936, is as ‘an expression indicating that the supply of an item is exhausted, or that a customer is not to be served’. The first of these definitions is the one that applies to Tierce’s line above (‘in the wine cellar updating the eighty-sixed list’).

The verb came later, in the sense ‘eject or debar (a person) from premises’, then in broader senses, such as the media advisor quoted in the New Yorker telling Robert Redford to ‘eighty-six the sideburns’. Again that’s per the OED, which dates the verb from 1959.

Green’s Dictionary of Slang takes it back further: the original usage to 1933, in Walter Winchell’s On Broadway column: ‘A Hollywood soda-jerker forwards this glossary of soda-fountain lingo out there … “Eighty-six” means all out of it.’ And the verb to 1948, in the Washington Post: ‘The Alcoholic Beverage Control Board eighty-sixed two Ninth st. grog centers yesterday – cut off their taps.’

Though I don’t hear it in Ireland, 86 proved an appealing bit of slang, producing other usages in subsequent decades: an exclamation meaning Get out! or Go away! (1964); and No! (1981); a verb meaning kill, murder, or execute (1978); and be finished or ready to leave (1999).

Now I can eighty-six this from my to-blog file.

Updates:

Ben Zimmer discussed food-industry code on Lexicon Valley a few years ago and more recently at the Atlantic. He shares possible origins of 86 (including the Chumley’s-bar story) and other examples of food-industry code (81: a glass of water). His conclusion:

All of the speculation masks the likeliest origin, that it is simply a vestige of the arbitrary codes shouted out by soda clerks. And eighty-six has persisted thanks to the service industry’s continuing need to share signals—whether it has to do with removing menu items or removing customers.

Slang, the language of the streets, the tavern, the underground, the counterculture, the gutter, has traditionally been seen as a male preserve. Women feature in it, of course – but chiefly, unflatteringly, as objects. Slang, as Jonathon Green writes in Language!, is ‘a gendered vocabulary that while it does not exclude woman, is keen to keep them in their place: the nagging wife, the sexy ingénue, the whore, the hag’.

So what of women not as objects in slang but as its creators and users? Far less has been written on this front. ‘Women’s use of slang is drastically under-reported,’ writes Green in his new book, Sounds & Furies: The Love–Hate Relationship between Women and Slang. As the world’s foremost slang lexicographer, he would know, and he has scoured the available records to describe the extent and nature of that relationship.

Those records go back centuries and surge in the digital era. Sounds & Furies is a rich social history told through a lexicological lens, from Chaucer to Mumsnet via Flappers and Valley Girls. There are ample, lengthy quotations and edifying commentary. The former can be grim on occasion and not for sensitive readers: slang’s treatment of social minorities, Green observes, is ‘depressingly conservative’; of women in particular it is ‘viciously misogynistic’.

The book’s focus, happily, is on women and slang, not in slang. Its sources are diverse: novels, newspapers, poems, plays, songs, ballads, court reports, vaudeville, memoirs, biographies, detective stories – crime being one of slang’s most fertile arenas – and of course the internet. In each case the slang is identified, contextualized, and analyzed. These often boisterous excerpts will delight fans of ‘low’ varieties of English.

Detecting authentic female slang is made trickier by the phenomenon of literary ‘ventriloquy’, whereby men write women and vice versa. But the results remain illuminating. A vogue for ribald pamphlets featuring women in stereotypical guises produced such titles as the 1699 An account of a great & famous scoldling match between four remarkable scolding fish-women of Rosemary-lane, and the like number of basket-women of Golden-lane, near Cripple-gate, on Monday last, upon a wager for five guinea’s.

As a ‘Tryal of their Skill at the Tongue-Tallent-Art’ it boasts an exchange of creative and colourful insults, many of them referring to sexual behaviour. But what is especially striking, Green finds, is that

other than the mutual recriminations conjured up for the text, there is no sense of moralising. If the basket-women and fish-wives wish to indulge their sexuality, if they are willing to go on the game, what matter. Nor is the scold herself pilloried. This is about verbal skill.

And what skill. Among the standout female contributors to slang who feature here are Mae West; Mary Frith (aka Moll Cutpurse); the ‘dirty blues’ singers of the 1910s–1930s; Helen Green van Campen (1880–1960), whose stories are ‘effectively invisible today’ but contributed 600 terms to the slang lexis, many for the first time; and Mary Elizabeth Braddon (1835–1915), author of some 80 novels:

She had no especial interest in recording the register [of slang], simply using it for its usual role of authenticity in one social sphere or another. Nonetheless she does seem to have been the first to put a few terms into print. Baby (a man, e.g., ‘this baby’), barnacle (a parasite), to chuck (to end an affair), jolly (a thrill or pleasure), to jump on (to attack, whether literal or figurative), lardy-dardy (affected), muddle (to make oneself drunk), off one’s nut (very eccentric, insane), rattle (to hit), rat-trap (a shabby or ramshackle building), roof (the head), smash (a heavy blow), muchly (as in ‘thank you muchly, predecessor to ‘ta . . .’) and she seems to be the first to record the thick (in this case asylum coffee, but used of any drink with a thick consistency, e.g. porter, tea or coffee).

The last chapter proper is a welcome account, and glossary, of lesbian slang. In lexicographical circles this has proved an elusive space: mainstream slang dictionaries repeat ‘the same small lexis’, while purpose-built dictionaries and glossaries ‘have little to offer’. But what is there is gathered, including online lists:

The Internet seems, as in so much else, to be making a difference. It is, perhaps, because for once those who have the option to amass this language are part of those who use it, rather than lexicography’s traditional coterie of old and certainly not lesbian men. The appearance online of a variety of lesbian slang lists may also be a generational thing. If one’s sexuality is far more out than has been the case, why not one’s vocabulary.

Reservations about the book’s male authorship are allayed by Green’s frank and self-effacing approach; blurbs by Julie Coleman and Deborah Cameron and a foreword by Kate Lister may further assuage doubt. In his introduction, on slang’s role as ‘a language that underpins group identification’ in the face of prevailing power structures, Green writes:

To denote 51 per cent of the population as ‘marginal’ seems counter-intuitive, but many activist women claim just that. Quality rather than quantity is what matters. Slang, the voice of the marginal, ought to be theirs too. If slang is seen as subversive and oppositional, are those qualities anywhere limited to men? It is the language of rebellion; in the era of #metoo, it seems an ideal vehicle.

Sounds & Furies is a unique and absorbing work that offers great bounty for lovers of social history – especially its lesser-lit corners – and the muckier side of language. At 550+ pages it is also excellent value. My only gripe is that it needed better copy-editing or proofreading to save this reader some orthographic distraction.

Sounds & Furies is newly published by Robinson, an imprint of Little Brown, who sent me a copy for review. You can order it from the publisher or your usual bookshop.

Culchie is a word used in Irish English to mean someone from the Irish countryside (or a small town or village), especially from the point of view of a Dubliner. Though originally pejorative, culchie has been partly reclaimed and is now often used neutrally, warmly, or as a tribal badge by those who live or come from beyond the Pale (i.e., Dublin and its urban environs).

While the word’s meaning is clear enough, its origin is uncertain and much speculated upon, as we’ll see. First, I’ll look at its use in Irish culture and literature. Its phonetic similarity to culture, incidentally, informed the aptly named (and now defunct) pop culture website Culch.ie, where I used to write about cult films – the URL trades nicely on Ireland’s internet top-level domain .ie.

The equivalent of a culchie elsewhere might be a bumpkin, a peasant, or a yokel. In Ireland the synonyms are likewise derogatory: bogger (bogman, bogwoman), mucker, the gloriously suggestive muck savage. So too is the antonym jackeen, referring to a certain type of Dubliner.

Brewer’s Dictionary of Irish Phrase and Fable notes that while culchie was initially an insult indicating rusticity, it now tends to be used in jest or affection, a change owing to Ireland’s modernisation, specifically ‘the rise in the standard of living and in educational standards in Ireland from the 1960s onwards’.

Mayo countryside: briars, stone walls, mossy verges, sheep, cattle, and muck are fond and familiar sights to any culchie worth their salt

The culchie stereotype still shows up in culchie jokes that exploit the rural/urban divide. It appeared more favourably in the celebrated Culchie Festival, whose (mainly farming-inspired) events included welly throwing, wool rolling, and a charity Honda 50 run. You can get a flavour – or a whiff – in archive clips from state broadcaster RTÉ.

Many Irish people grow up in rural parts and settle, at least for a time, in the city. And so, as Rob McNamara writes, ‘Some of us are a curious blend of the two, never knowing quite which we belong to and face mockery on both sides.’ Slagging (like BrE slagging off, but more playful) is a social lubricant in Ireland, and the culchie/townie divide offers a readymade basis for it.

You can test your culchie status with these quizzes from Valerie Loftus, a writer from Mayo: the significance of that place will soon become apparent. Ultimately, writes Mary Feely, ‘It’s not carried in the blood – a Dub can have culchie parents and vice-versa – but it is fixed at birth.’ As the saying goes, you can take a person out of the bog …

Search for culchie on the Irish Times, Irish Examiner, TheJournal.ie, Twitter, or YouTube and you’ll get a further sense of its salience as a cultural marker in Ireland. Yet for all its reappropriation, culchie can still serve as a putdown. Tara Flynn’s book You’re Grand: The Irishwoman’s Secret Guide to Life zeroes in on the connotations:

A “culchie” is someone from the countryside, or small town. Or just plain outside Dublin. In fact, Dubliners are really the only people in the land who will never be called culchies at some point. …

We’re supposed to be un-chic, good with animals, able to predict the weather, have few electrical outlets and be very friendly, but a biteen thick. City dwellers tend to see themselves as having attributes exactly the opposite of these. In other words, they think they’re great.

There was an attempt to give Dubs the nickname “Jackeen” but it doesn’t seem to sting as much as “culchie” does. In fact, they like it because it makes them feel even more Dubliny. We’ve even tried to take back “culchie” for ourselves, but the lingering bovine associations just can’t quite be shaken off.

Culchie is put to good use in Irish literature. Characters in Normal People by Sally Rooney (another author native to Mayo) move to Dublin from Sligo in the west of Ireland, and the social and sociolinguistic differences between those worlds sometimes arise in conversation:

Is that your type, you like uncool guys? he said.
You tell me.
Why, am I uncool?
I think so, she said. I mean that in a nice way, I don’t like cool people.
He sat up slightly to look down at her.
Am I really? he said. I’m not offended but honestly, I thought I was kind of cool.
You’re such a culchie, though.
Am I? In what way am I?
You have the thickest Sligo accent, she said.

(See my post on southern Irish accents for related discussion.) Elsewhere in Normal People, the young man with the thick Sligo accent is described as a ‘milk-drinking culchie’ who drinks it ‘directly from the carton’. Eoin Colfer’s Benny and Babe conveys the same perceived lack of sophistication by using culchie as a modifier:

They still kept in touch Sort of. A letter once in a while. Maybe an accidental meeting on the main street if she was in town buying jeans, or whatever else you couldn’t get in those culchie shops in the back of beyonds.

As does Maeve Binchy, in Light a Penny Candle: ‘Oh, nothing as bad as a culchie wedding I always say.’

People from towns and counties adjacent to Dublin, such as Kildare, may or may not be culchies, depending on who’s deciding. In Nuala Ní Chonchúr’s novel You, the eponymous ten-year-old narrator says:

Noel doesn’t like The Irish Times. He says it’s a Proddy newspaper and then he says ‘Up the Republic!’ and Cora says ‘Will you stop that codology.’ Cora says things like that because she’s a culchie. But she hates being called that. ‘I’m from inside the Pale,’ she says, as if that matters. You say that Kildare is not the centre of the universe and she says it is for some people.

Proddy is short for Protestant, and codology is codding, i.e., fooling, messing around, another Irish English dialect word, which appends the technical suffix –ology ironically to the vernacular verb cod ‘to joke, hoax, or fool’.¹

Ní Chonchúr’s book hints at how culchie could be used as a tease among children. Adults might do the same thing, and call it slagging, but with no real offence intended or taken. At least, not usually.

Etymologically, the most popular idea is that culchie comes from Kiltimagh, the name of a small town in County Mayo (seen as provincial or remote), from Irish Coillte Mach ‘woods of the plain’. English and Irish pronunciations can be heard at Logainm.² Kiltimagh is the etymon suggested by the OED, Oxford, and Collins.

Culchie could come simply from coillte ‘woods’ or coillteach ‘wooded’. It may be a clipping of agricultural, arising as university slang for students of agriculture. T.P. Dolan’s Dictionary of Hiberno-English briefly notes this possibility. Other sources suggest the Irish phrase cúl an tí /ˈkuːlɑ(n)ˈtʃiː/ ‘back of the house’, the idea being that that’s how country folk visit neighbours. But this has the ring of folk etymology for me.

Another possibility is advanced in a 1997 letter to the Irish Times:

In the 1930s and 1940s, we told Dubliners that we were from the Cúl Siar Amach [/ˈkuːlˌʃɪərəˈmɑx/ ‘back out west’, i.e., back of beyond] to baffle them when they asked where we were from. We became the feared Culchies, invading Dublin to take all the good Civil Service jobs. Where in heaven did this nonsense about Kiltimagh come from?

But the Kiltimagh connection is strengthened in Brendan Behan’s Confessions of an Irish Rebel, quoted in Slanguage, Bernard Share’s dictionary of Irish slang and colloquialisms: Behan refers to ‘the Culchiemachs, as we called the Irish-speaking people’. One final idea that I came across draws a connection with culch, a bed of shells and stones used in oyster farming.

Other etymologies have been proposed, but those are the main ones. The earliest use of the word that I’ve seen, cited in Green’s Dictionary of Slang, is from ‘The Munster-Man’s Bothabue’ in Luke Caffrey’s Gost, c.1790:

But I’ll away to Culchy fair my Bothabue to find,
I’ll range the flow’ry meadows gay in hopes that they prove kind.

After that there’s nothing for over a century in the usual sources. So it’s an open question, unless someone digs up a persuasive origin story. Don’t forget your wellies.

If you go digging, be ready for a mess. Field entrance in County Mayo.

¹ Joyce uses all these words in Ulysses, e.g.: ‘you can cod him up to the two eyes’; ‘Arrah, give over your bloody codding, Joe, says I’; ‘Bloom comes out with the why and the wherefore and all the codology of the business’.

² That coill ‘wood’ was often anglicized as ‘kil(l)’ has caused no little confusion, because ‘kil(l)’ was also used for cill ‘church’. Plural coillte ‘woods’ was anglicized less problematically as ‘kilty’ or ‘quilty’: Kiltyclogher in County Leitrim comes from Coillte Cloghair ‘woods of the stony place’.

In a recent conversation, I heard the word awkness in reference to a socially awkward situation. I hadn’t heard it before, but its meaning was obvious in context. After all, its cousin awks ‘awkward’ has been around a while; I’ve even used it myself.

When I looked into awkness, I had a surprise. It sounds, as I said on Twitter, like a millennial coinage – and it is, more or less. But not originally: the OED dates awkness to the late 16th century, defining it thesaurusily as ‘wrongness, irrationality, perversity, untowardness, awkwardness, ineptitude’.

The first citation is from a 1587 religious book by Philippe de Mornay (tr. Philip Sidney & Arthur Golding): ‘The skilfull can work much upon little, and by his cunning ouercome the awknesse of his stuffe.’ The citations continue till 1674, with the word also spelled awknesse, awknes, and aukness.

And then: obsolescence.

Well, not exactly.

Awkness, according to Anne Curzan’s book Fixing English, got caught up in the debate over ‘inkhorn terms’, learnèd words borrowed in a flurry from French, Greek, or Latin that (its critics implied) required too much ink. The purists preferred what they deemed to be more native English words: outborn for foreign, foresayer for prophet, awkness for perversity. But awkness didn’t stick.

Richard Chenevix Trench, a Dublin clergyman and philologist whose work would fuel the project that became the OED, wrote in his 1857 paper ‘On Some Deficiencies in Our English Dictionaries’:

Families of words in our Dictionaries are often incomplete, some members inserted, while others are omitted; the family being really larger and more widely spread than they leave us to suppose. Thus ‘awk,’ which survives in our ‘awkward,’ has not merely ‘awkly,’ but ‘awkness,’ which none of them have found room for.

Samuel Johnson, for one, had found no room for awkness in his Dictionary of 1755, though he did include awk, describing it as ‘a barbarous contraction’. Awkly ‘untoward, perverse’ (c.950) and awky ‘untoward, difficult, awkward’ (1655) are recorded in the OED but scarcely at all elsewhere.

Middle English awk (‘probably a borrowing from early Scandinavian’, says the OED) led to Early Modern English awkness, and like awky and awkly they are labelled obsolete. They certainly didn’t thrive, but they did survive: A search in Google Books shows occasional uses in the intervening years – though probably not enough to consider their currency continuous, which brings us their recent reinvention.

It’s possible, of course, that people in the 18–20C were using the niche or more stigmatized awk forms more often than we imagine, in speech and informal writing, where their usage went unrecorded. Today we have far greater access to records of informal registers, and that access shows a revival especially of the slangy abbreviated forms.

Awk, awks, and awky all seem to have re-emerged as part of the vogue for clippings like totes, defo, and adorbs. Searching Twitter for phrases like so awk, so awks, and so awky reveals their renewed popularity.

Awkness, invented anew through awk + –ness, is far less common in Twitter searches, and I found no hits in the GloWbE or iWeb corpora (1.9b and 14b words, respectively). But it’s out there – as are awksy, awksies, awksiness, and even awksness, despite its relative awkiness.

What awk word will you be using – or inventing – today?

How slang catches on, survives, and fades:

The schwa is never stressed? Ridiculous, says Geoff Lindsey:

What America got wrong about Ebonics:

How dialect coaches put the accent on performances:

The hidden rules of conversation: a primer on Grice’s maxims:

What motivates polyglots to learn new languages:

For more like this, see ‘Seven videos about language’ from last year, ‘Six videos about language’ from further back, or browse the video tag in the Sentence first archive.

‘Lucky might get going all of a sudden. Then we’d be banjaxed.’ (Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot)

Banjaxed and bockety are a fun pair of words in the Irish English vernacular. Banjaxed I heard from an early age; bockety was not in my west-of-Ireland dialect, but I adopted it later for occasional use.

The words have similar but distinct meanings.

If something is banjaxed, it’s ruined, broken, confounded, or shattered (including in the ‘tired’ sense; cf. killed in Irish slang). It’s often applied to damaged or destroyed machines – vehicles, phones, computers, household appliances – or their parts. It can apply to people, if they’re injured or drunk, for example, or to abstractions like plans or systems.

If something is bockety, it’s physically unsteady, impaired, or imperfect. It’s more likely to be usable than if it’s banjaxed: a bockety chair or bicycle might wobble but function, whereas a banjaxed one is not to be trusted, if it can be used at all. Body parts are often bockety too. I’ll return to this word later.

This car in David Mach‘s installation The Oligarch’s Nightmare, pictured at the Galway Arts Festival 2023, is well and truly banjaxed. And that wheel looks fierce bockety.

The origins of banjaxed (occasionally bandjaxed) are uncertain. The OED says it was ‘perhaps originally Dublin slang’, which doesn’t get us far, while the Oxford Dictionary of Modern Slang speculates that it was formed by association with banged, bashed, and smashed. Maybe.

Green’s Dictionary of Slang suggests that the noun banjax was a semi-euphemism of ballocks. Dave Wilton, at Wordorigins.org, writes that it’s a short leap from ballocks as a verb meaning ‘make a mess’ to banjax with a similar sense. (See my post on ballocks/bollocks/bollox/bollix at Strong Language for more on that word.)

Banjax(ed) has always felt vaguely rude to me, bordering obscurely on vulgarity; etymology might underlie this feeling. There’s also a bilingual pun about banjax being the ladies’ toilet, since bean /’bæn/ is Irish Gaelic for ‘woman’, and jacks is Irish English slang for ‘bathroom’.

The noun banjax, which may predate the verb, appears in Seán Ó Casey’s 1920s play Juno and the Paycock: ‘I’m tellin’ you the scholar, Bentham, made a banjax o’ th’ Will.’ Wiktionary defines it as ‘a mess or undesirable situation made as a result of incompetence’ – I’d qualify the subordinate phrase with a ‘sometimes’.

Banjax (v.) appears in a few major dictionaries, including Merriam-Webster, American Heritage, Green’s, and Collins, which notes the common connotations of incompetence. It usually occurs in the form banjaxed (i.e., as a past participle or participial adjective). Some Irish writers are especially fond of it, like Edna O’Brien:

Van Gogh knew a thing or two, but think what it did to his brain, banjaxed it. (Johnny I Hardly Knew You)

‘Emma had suggested that you hide, said your presence might banjax her position.’ (A Pagan Place)

‘Say the separating machine got banjaxed up at the creamery,’ Morgan said. (‘Tough Men’, in The Love Object)

and Flann O’Brien:

The torture had him banjaxed altogether. (The Hard Life)

‘Michael Gilhaney,’ said the Sergeant, ‘is an example of a man that is nearly banjaxed from the principle of the Atomic Theory. Would it astonish you to hear that he is nearly half a bicycle?’ (The Third Policeman)

They drive away the roller and here is his black heart sitting there as large as life in the middle of the pulp of his banjaxed corpse. They couldn’t crush his heart! (At Swim-Two-Birds)

Green’s has further citations, mostly from Irish writers.

Mark Davies’s GloWbE corpus highlights banjax* as an example of Irish dialect: 59 of its 77 hits are from Irish English, 52 of them for banjaxed. And of the 16 British ones, several are duplicates or appear on Arseblog, a blog about Arsenal football club written by an Irishman.

Banjaxed shows up in Scottish English too, sometimes in high-profile places. In the rebooted Star Trek film from 2009, Scotty describes the shield emitters as ‘totally banjaxed’.

Banjaxed objects in GloWbE include body parts (my arm, my right knee, her knees, Robbie Keane’s Achilles heel), machines and tech (websites, rental bikes, a car), and physical objects (bed, door lock). Anatomical/medical references proved popular in the pandemic, as the Coronavirus Corpus shows:

I was as banjaxed by the coronavirus as anyone else. [source, NZ]

But there undoubtedly are a number of people whose lives have been banjaxed by the thing. [source]

That means tens of thousands of those will go on to be rendered banjaxed by Long Covid. [source]

Most of all, abstract entities are banjaxed, often of a political or structural nature: Ireland, the country, the economy, our banking system, the country’s accounts, etc. Country is the most frequent collocate: ‘the country is banjaxed’, ‘the party that banjaxed the country’, etc.

Finally, a fun piece of trivia: banjaxed was Terry Wogan’s favourite word:

Which explains this:

*

Now for bockety. Loaned directly from Irish bacaidí /’bɑkəd̪i/, it’s a synonym of bacach /’bɑkəx/, both of which, as far as I know, can function as an adjective, meaning ‘lame’, ‘halting’, ‘imperfect’, or as a noun, meaning ‘lame person’ (or ‘mean person’, ‘sponger’, etc.).

The adjectival use of bockety is more common, and is the only use listed in the OED. The first of two closely related senses is dated to 1842, the second to 1902, though I doubt that’s the final word:

1. Of a person: unable to walk without difficulty; infirm, lame. Also of a body part: injured, impaired.

2. That has fallen into a state of disrepair; likely to fall apart or break down; rickety, ramshackle.

A search on Irish forum boards.ie shows the popularity of reference to body parts: there are bockety legs, knees, feet, hips, backs, ovaries, heads, teeth, and entire bodies. There’s often a sense of long-term impairment or gradual deterioration, whereas a banjaxed body part tends to indicate a more sudden or severe injury. At least that’s my intuition.

Bockety often refers to everyday objects, such as wheels, bicycles, furniture, or other parts of a home that have fallen into disrepair but may remain functional. If only barely: Mary McAleese, president of Ireland in 1997–2011, writes in her memoir of ‘a bockety office chair’ that would ‘lurch suddenly to the left and throw me onto the floor’.

OED aside, bockety is absent from mainstream dictionaries but appears in Irish English ones, whose examples refer to a bockety sign, chair leg, and hay rick (A Dictionary of Hiberno-English by T.P. Dolan) and a bockety wardrobe, pig’s bladder (used as a football), and hoor (a quasi-derogatory term usually applied to men) (Slanguage by Bernard Share).

I last saw it in the wild a few weeks ago, when I caught up on a long, comic article about the Metaverse in New York Magazine by Paul Murray, author of the award-winning Skippy Dies and The Bee Sting:

. . . the unlovable lo-fi graphics and interpersonal randomness can give Horizon Worlds a kind of a perverse, bockety charm. Unlike Twitter or Instagram, there’s no scope to broadcast your brand here; everybody’s just thrown together, like at a ’90s music festival with no music.

Other examples that I’ve seen by Irish authors include:

The door had been wedged open by a bockety chair on which was sellotaped a hand-scrawled sign: ART THIS WAY. (Doireann Ní Ghríofa, A Ghost in the Throat)

I won’t see you riding your bockedy bike (Pat Ingoldsby, ‘For Hughie’, in Salty Water)

. . . we were admitted to a room that felt like an oul’ one’s tiny parlour: a red formica-topped table, a couple of battered kitchen chairs, the smell of cooking oil and boiled cabbage and stale smoke, an old Bakelite radio set on a bocketty occasional table.” (Declan Hughes, All the Dead Voices)

You may have noticed the three spellings (bockety, bockedy, bocketty) in those three uses: a not unusual degree of variation in an anglicized Irish loanword – see my post on mar dhea for notes on this.

GloWbE has just 4 hits for bockety (none for the variant spellings), referring to spectacles, roads, and pop music (bockety pop is a microgenre I’m unfamiliar with). The iWeb corpus has 18, though 8 refer to the Sarah Argent play The Bockety World of Henry & Bucket, about ‘two friends who live in a bockety world of discarded objects’.

Also featured in iWeb are a bockety shopping cart, table, framework, cage, beads, stairs, mobile phone, and bicycle – which is banjaxed too: Róisín Ingle’s Irish Times article on cycling begins thus:

I’ve been freewheeling around Dublin town since the red letter day aged eight or nine when I inherited a thoroughly banjaxed third-hand bike that once had belonged to several older brothers or sisters. It was blue and bockety, the saddle leather battered and worn, the chain creaky and in need of a good dose of 3-in-1 oil, but it was mine, all mine.

Which brings us full, bockety circle. To see us out, here’s a video of a dog named Bockety and their pal helping a farmer plant potatoes in County Kerry. Absolute full marks for Irishness.