Dot Wordsworth

Ballocks

I agree with James Joyce on the spelling ballocks. The Liberal Democrats made their MEPs wear T-shirts printed with ‘Bollocks to Brexit’ to the European parliament. But ballocks are to balls what hillocks are to hills.

An old word, it appears in a manuscript glossary from the early 10th century. To spell it bollocks is like spelling bastard as bastid, to which many walls bear witness. It appeared in the Oxford English Dictionary in 1885 under ballock, as it still does in Jonathon Green’s Dictionary of Slang. The OED notes, unsmilingly, that the spelling bollock ‘shows rounding’.

Also without a smile, it remarks that it is found ‘usually in the plural’.

The Irish often use ballocks to mean a blundering idiot, in the singular number: ‘I’m a ballocks,’ says Temple in Portrait of the Artist. Joyce gets him to add: ‘That word is a most interesting word. That’s the only English dual number. Did you know?’ That’s only a joke. Old English had a selection of dual pronouns: wit (‘we two’), unc (‘to us two’), inc (‘to you two’), but they sadly fell out of use in the 14th century.

Anyway, some Lib Dem spokesman said on the wireless that ballocks is not a swear-word. That can’t be true.

‘The word is sometimes written with asterisks,’ comments the OED avuncularly, ‘so as to avoid the charge of obscenity.’ At most it can be said that displaying the album cover for the Sex Pistols’ Never Mind the Bollocks in a shop window was found in 1977 not to contravene the Indecent Advertisements Act 1889 (invoked in 1891 over a poster for the Royal Aquarium’s curvaceous acrobat Zaeo).

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