‘What is a kibosh?’ asked a German medical friend of my husband’s, when the word cropped up. No one knew, though we were certain it was the kibosh and it was put on things.
All our lives, the earliest citation for the word had been from Dickens’s Sketches by Boz (1836): ‘ “Hoo-roar,” ejaculates a pot-boy in a parenthesis, “put the kye-bosk on her, Mary”.’
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