Several new-to-me words fell into my lap just yesterday. One of those was the excellent term banjax. This came up in a tweet by the editor Andy Hollandbeck[1]:
I mentioned on Twitter that this was new to me, and several people noted that they knew it. Some of these people are in Ireland or in the UK, which, as it turns out, makes sense: the OED lists this word as “Anglo-Irish slang”; M-W lists it as “chiefly Irish.” But the cites in the OED include one from Beckett in Waiting for Godot and another from an issue of the New Yorker in 1972. So it’s maybe a little mysterious why I don’t seem to know this word.
But, you might be asking, what does it mean? As a verb, it means “damage, ruin.” The OED’s more expansive definition has it as “to batter or destroy (a person or thing); to ruin; to confound, stymie.” There’s an adjectival sense as well: “The banking system is banjaxed,” a cite from the Times in London.
All these senses fit with Andy’s tweet. But if I had to choose one meaning for his use of it, I’d suggest that “confound” fits best.
No one will speculate about where the word comes from beyond something like “perhaps Dublin slang.” So maybe it comes out of Irish. The OED’s earliest cite (Godot) is from 1956, but it seems clear that it’s older than that. Someone on Twitter noted that people in their grandmother’s generation used banjax, and Green’s Dictionary of Slang has a noun banjax (“a complete mess”) from 1925 and an adjectival sense from 1939. From this, one might conclude that the adjectival form is older than the verb, but more information is needed.
I don’t know whether this word is a regionalism in the United States, or whether USians who know it got it from an older generation with roots in Ireland or the UK. Anyway, I’m certainly interested in adding it to the list of words we should have in American English.
Origins. The other day, there was discussion on Twitter about words for animals. From that discussion I learned about a couple of animals that were named for pigs.
The lexicographer Serenity Carr noted that porcupine essentially means “prickly pig.” In French that was porc espin, ultimately from Latin porcus + spina. It came into medieval English as porke despyne. By the 1500s this had evolved into variations like porkpine or porkepyn, and by the 1600s it had largely settled into its modern form. (1676: “That Porcupins kill Lions, by darting into their body their quills.”)
With porcupine, you can see the outlines of its origin if you look at it a certain way. The real surprise to me was the name porpoise. As the editor and linguist Jonathon Owen explained, a porpoise is also a kind of pig. In classical Latin, the critter was a porcopiscis: porco for “pig” and piscis for “fish.” (The OED translates this as “hog-fish,” fair enough.) In later Latin this turned into variations like porpasius, porpiscis, and purpasius. In early French it developed further (porpes, porpais), and it came with the French to England, where we messed about with a variety of spellings until we settled on porpoise.
During this discussion I was struck by how the word for “pig” was also a kind of generic way to name animals. Jonathon noted that the German word for porpoise is Meerschwein, which is “sea pig.” The word aardvark is from a Dutch/Afrkiaans word meaning “earth pig.” The name hyena comes from a Greek root for “hog.” Not to mention guinea pigs, groundhogs, and hedgehogs (though the last apparently got the name because of its snout).
I suppose it’s generally true that when we encounter a new thing, we tend to frame it in terms of what we’re familiar with. Whether that’s a new word or a new animal.
Like this? Read all the Friday words.
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1. As an aside, congratulations to Andy’s son for this achievement! [^]
For what it’s worth: The first time I saw ‘banjaxed’ probably was in ‘Waiting for Godot,’ which I read in the summer of 1992, but somewhere along the line later, it reappeared in my life and has always stuck out as a word that I wanted to add to my lexicon — so I use it whenever I can. (I wouldn’t be surprised if I read it in either Ulysses, which I never finished, or Infinite Jest, which I did.)
I much appreciate learning about it, and will likewise try to find places to use it!
I’m first-gen Irish American. I learned ‘banjaxed’ from my parents and their siblings, who used it with humor/exasperation for snafus, insurmountable difficulties, etc.
I don’t spend a lot of time in Ireland, but my impression is that it’s still in conversational use.
I wouldn’t be surprised to see it in any of the Dublin newspapers.