Today's Word "Kibosh"
Published in Vocabulary
kibosh \KI-bahsh or ki-BAHSH\ (noun) - 1 : (Slang) A restraining element; something that stops or halts something else. 2 : (Slang) Nonsense; palaver.
"Jasmine had an idea for a weekend getaway, but her husband's plans to go fishing put the kibosh on her scheme."
Etymology is unsettled, but probably not from Yiddish or Anglo-Hebrew "kye b(r)osh" that literally means "eighteen British-coins" in Yiddish. It is hard to see the semantic connection here. The word first emerged in England around 1836 when it appeared in Charles Dickens' "Sketches by Boz": "'Hoo-roar,' ejaculates a pot-boy in a parenthesis, 'put the kye-bosk on her, Mary.'" More likely, "kibosh" is a corruption of "caboche" [ke-'bahsh], a verbal variant of "cabbage" which means to decapitate (a deer) right behind the horns. "Caboche" is a term of British heraldry ("stag's head caboched (or cabossed) on a field of gold").
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