Banjax (pronounced ban-jaks)
(1) In UK
(originally Irish) slang, a mess or undesirable situation created through incompetence
(2) In UK
(originally Irish) slang, to ruin, incapacitate or break; to batter or destroy
(a person or thing).
Early 1900s
(contested): Apparently a regional (Dublin) slang of unknown origin but the
most supported theory is it being a euphemism for “ballocks” (a variant of “bollocks”
(in this context meaning “rubbish; nonsense”, but associated also with “the tentacles”,
the latter the origin of the vulgarity which demands a euphemism. The alternative spellings were banjack,
bandjax, such variations not unusual in the evolution of slang where so much
transmission is oral. Banjax is a noun
& verb and banjaxing & banjaxed are verbs; the noun plural is banjaxes
or banjaxs. The suggestion a banjax was a
“type of electric banjo” was wholly facetious.
Although one
dictionary of Hiberno-English (the collective name for the dialects of English
native to the island of Ireland (known also as Irish English (IrE) & (more
confusingly), Anglo-Irish), The Irish Use
of English (2006) compiled by Irish lexicographer Professor Terence Dolan
(1943–2019) offers two possible sources (1) a possible combination of “bang”
& “smash” and (2) a Corkese (a regional dialect of English native to County
Cork) word meaning “for public lavatory for females”. There is support for the link with Corkese
because in that dialect the vowel sounds in Corkese significantly can differ
from other varieties of IrE and the “a” in “cat” can sound more like “cot” to
non-locals which would make “banjax” sound closer to “ballocks” and as early as
the 1920s the idea of it as a euphemism for “ballocks” had appeared (described
in some cases as a “semi-euphemism”). Whether
or not it’s in any way related to the later meaning isn’t known but there’s a
document from 1899 listing “Banjax” as the name of a racehorse belong to one Mr
Sweeney; the names of race horses are among the more random studies in language
so any link is speculative but the meaning was obvious by September 1909 in the
report of court proceedings in the Dublin Daily Express, where the transcript
recorded: “In
the case of a Nationalist claim when the witness entered the box the Unionist
agent said that this was a complete ‘banjax’ (laughter)."
It appears
also in Act 3 of the play Juno and the
Paycock (1924) by the Irish dramatist and memoirist Seán O'Casey
(1880–1964): “I’m
tellin’ you the scholar, Bentham, made a banjax o’ the Will.” O’Casey was of the socialist left and
regarded as the “first Irish playwright
of note” to focus on the working classes Dublin, including them as
fully-developed and explored characters rather than as caricatures or political
symbols. He wasn’t exactly a proto-Angry
Young Man (said by some to a tautology in the case of Irish youth) but his
Irishness, while genuine, was “tuned”: in 1907 he Gaelicised his name from John
Casey to Seán Ó Cathasaigh. It must have
been known as a popular oral form because it’s in a number of examples of Irish
literature including A Nest of Simple Folk by Seán
Ó Faoláin (1900–1991): “For two streets Johno kept complaining to the driver that
it was a nice banjax if a fellow…” The Oxford English Dictionary
(OED) noted the certain literary respectability banjax gained when Nobel
Prize laureate (Literature, 1969) Samuel Beckett (1906-1989)) included it in a
passage in 1956.
Banjaxed cars in California: 2005 Mercedes-Benz SL 65 (R230) AMG roadster (2005, left) and 2012 Porsche 911 (997) Carrera S (2012, right). Lindsay Lohan had some really bad luck while driving black, German cars.
Not for the
first time, word nerds can thank the Daily
Mail for enriching the current vernacular for in September 2024 it began
publishing extracts from Unleashed,
the memoir of Boris Johnson (b 1964; UK prime-minister 2019-2022) to be
released on 10 October. Being the Daily Mail, the fragments chosen as
extracts are perhaps not representative of the whole but they’re doubtlessly
the best click-bait, including discussions in Number 10 about the British Army
invading Continental Europe (and thus NATO territory) for the first time since
the D-Day landings (6 June 1944), observations about the “long and pointy black” nostrils of
his predecessor, a non-apologia dismissing the “Partygate” scandal as much ado
about, if not quite nothing, not a great deal, his treacherous colleagues and,
of course, something about Meghan & Harry.
The probably brief revival of banjax came in the account of his stay in
hospital under the care of the National Health Service (NHS) after testing
positive in 2020 in the early stages of what would later be named the COVID-19
pandemic. Fond of quoting the classics,
Mr Johnson recalled the plague of Athens (430 BC) which killed perhaps a third
of the population but resorted also to the earthy, detailing his declining health
as he was “banjaxed” by the virus, descending
from his usual “bullish” and “rubicund” state to within days having a face “the colour of
mayonnaise”.
Best though was his vivid pen-portrait of Sir Keir Starmer (b 1962; prime-minister of the UK since 2024), his “irritable face” during a COVID-19–era debate in the House of Commons said to be “like a bullock having a thermometer unexpectedly shoved in its rectum”. That was an allusion to a prime-ministerial barb accusing the then leader of the opposition of being unable to say schools were safe to re-open because it would “go against his masters in the teaching unions”. “A great ox has stood on his tongue” he told the speaker. Although the Daily Mail didn’t bother, the use of a simile in which a politician is compared to a bullock does need some footnoting for an international audience. In the UK, a bullock is “a castrated male bovine animal of any age” while in US English it’s “a young bull (an uncastrated male bovine animal)” and in other places of the old British Empire (Australia, India & New Zealand) it’s an “ox, an adult male bovine used for draught (usually but not always castrated)”. One can see how these regional differences might make a difference to someone reading Unleashed.
Pleasingly, it’s not the first time one politician has used the imagery of another having a medical device “shoved” in his rectum. Harry Truman in 1951 wrote to an old friend expressing the wish he could shove a trocar (a sharp-pointed hollow cylindrical instrument (enclosed in a cannula), used (1) in medicine for removing fluid from bodily cavities and (2) by vets and ranchers to “relieve intestinal gas” in cattle) up some of the “stuffed shirts” in Congress: “You know what happens when you stick one of them in an old bull that’s clovered [ie suffering excessive internal gas as a result of eating too much clover]. “The report is loud and the wind whistles – but the bull usually comes down to size and recovers.” President Truman liked “windy” as a way of describing talkative politicians, applying it to the infamous William “Wild Bill” Langer (1886–1959; US senator (Republican-North Dakota 1940-1959)), long a thorn in his side but he never forgot the lessons he learned from old Tom Pendergast (1872–1945) who ran the corrupt Democratic Party machine in Kansas City & Jackson County, Missouri, 1925-1939. Accordingly, Republicans generally got attacked and another called “windy” was Arthur Vandenberg (1884–1951; US senator (Republican-Michigan 1928-1951)) who was generally supportive of Truman’s foreign policy, something which didn’t save him from being shoved with the (figurative) presidential trocar. The noun & verb trocar dates from the early 1700s and was from the French trocart (literally “three-sided”), the construct being tro- (a variant of trois (three)) + cart (a variant of carre (side)), from the Latin quadra (something square) (the connection being as a corruption of trois-quart (three-quarters).
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