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37 °F Forecast | Road Cams Thursday, March 24, 2005 Today's News | Classifieds | Autos | Homes | Jobs | Tempo | Health | Community | Home Delivery SECTIONS Home Page Local News Sports Business Obituaries Life Opinion Tempo AP News Weather Classified Archives Site Map SPECIAL SECTIONS Since We Asked Outdoor Journal Menu Guide How To Guide Health Readers' Choice Real Estate Showcase Real Estate Guide Joy Magazine Homelife Magazine Wedding Guide Passport to the Rogue Valley SHOP OUR VALLEY AutoFinder HomeFinder JobFinder Classified Place an ad TOP JOBS EXTRA Ashland News NIE Personals Movie Times TV Times E The People Volunteer Moving here? eSouthernOregon CUSTOMER SERVICE FAQ's Advertise with us Home Delivery Employment Contact Us Media Kit Oregon Road Conditions & Cams Email Story to a Friend March 23, 2005 Since You Asked Is this the final word on kibosh argument? Your etymology gurus need to go back to the drawing (or Ouija) board. "Kibosh" does not exist in the Yiddish language, nor does anything remotely like it. If "keibe" is High German, it wouldn’t have migrated into Yiddish, which was based, some say, in Middle-High German. — Herschl H., certified vegvayzer, The Sholem Community, Los Angeles Oy, veh is mir! We’re getting all verklempt here, feeling like shmendriks. Researching words sometimes makes us meshugana, and we wordsmiths so like Yiddish that we often attribute as much as we can to it. Our motto: "When it doubt, it must be Yiddish!" Advertisement We’ll just go wipe the shmutz off our shnozzle and get back to work. Another reader gave us the scoop via The Word Detective ( www.word-detective.com ), a newspaper column written by Evan Morris. He finds a different but plausible Yiddish connection: "Kibosh" (usually pronounced "KYE-bosh") ... is slang, and very old slang indeed — Charles Dickens used it in his description of the squalid sections of London in 1836, although he spelled it "kye-bosk." Several authorities trace "kibosh" to the Yiddish words "kye" (meaning "eighteen") and "bosh" ("pence"), making a "kibosh" a coin worth a shilling and sixpence, a negligible sum. Thus, if you were "kiboshed," you were reduced to nearly nothing. Incidentally, the word "bosh," meaning nonsense, is not related and comes from the Turkish word "bosh," meaning "empty or worthless." Another, more likely, theory: Some authorities believe that "kibosh" was based on the Gaelic phrase "cie bais" (pronounced "ky-bosh"), meaning "cap of death." Evidently, in trials in ancient Ireland, the cie bas, a black skullcap, was donned by the judge before he sentenced a prisoner to death, and apparently the phrase "cie bais" is an established metaphor in modern Irish. An added bit of evidence for this theory is that the Irish term is most often used in the phrase "put the cie bais on. ..." Send questions to "Since You Asked," Mail Tribune Newsroom, P.O. Box 1108, Medford, OR 97501; by fax to 541-776-4376; or by e-mail to [email protected] . We’re sorry, but the volume of questions received prevents us from answering all of them. Mail Tribune Home | Local News | Sports | Business | Obituaries | Life | Opinion AP News | Archives | Site Map | Community | Classified Copyright © 1997-2005 Mail Tribune, Inc. All rights reserved. Privacy Policy | Terms & Conditions | Website Feedback Student Loan Consolidation Conference Calls - $50/Month Home Security Systems Trunks, Footlocker, Trunk, Footlockers home equity loans helzberg Slippers Student Loans afsa teleconferencing Memory Foam Mattress w2 forms Tatoo Advertisement s