Loose Lips	Loose Lips Archive

Miss Poubelle was lucky enough to spend a few days on the fabulous island of Mykonos this summer. The town is gorgeous, with cubist white build- ings piled on top of each other like sugar cubes, and narrow, pedestrian walkways leading through them to the bustling harbor. The island also has several wonderful clothing-optional beaches, the gayest and most fabulous of which is called Super Paradise. To get to Super Paradise, you take a small boat that drops you off on the beach and collects you a few hours later.

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Miss Poubelle was fortunate to strike up a conversation with a group of vacationing Brits on the boat. To protect their anonymity she'll call them Ffiona, Sebastian, Nigel, and Gareth. We ended up sharing beach umbrellas and after a bit of Heineken, the slang began to flow. Learning that Miss Poubelle was etymologist, Gareth asked her how much she knew about British bollocks.

Bollocks is an extremely versatile word in British English, with no real equivalent in American. In the most literal sense, bollocks means "testicles." But it is also part of a confusing number of idioms, where it means things like "nonsense," and "the best." It's nearly as versatile in British English as fuck.

Of course, Miss Poubelle carries the Oxford English Dictionary with her everywhere, even to nude beaches in Greece. So she was able to figure out in a few minutes that ballocks (or bollocks) is one of the oldest words in English for the testicles. The OED has a citation from the year 1000, where beallucus is given as the English translation of Latin testiculi. Etymologically, it is a diminutive of the word ball. The -ock suffix is somewhat archaic in English, but it is used in words like hillock (a small hill) and bullock (a small bull). So a ballock is a small ball, and that seems like an appropriate name for the testicles. Bollocks is just a pronunciation variant of ballocks.

"So far, so good," said Ffiona, "but what about when we say someone is talking bollocks, and mean he's talking a right load of shit?" Miss Poubelle scratched her head (and her bollocks). The OED lists this meaning, but doesn't explain how nonsense is related to the testicles. After rummaging around for a while, she started to get an idea of the connections. Words meaning "to fool around, to make a mess" are often derived from words for sex or the toilet. So we have terms like fuck up, foul up, screw up, and mucked up, as well as the less familiar arse around, piss about, and piss up.

Talking about messes and foul ups, brings up two testicular references. In British English, a balls up is foul up; we also have the verb to bollix, meaning to "mess up." It's a short step from screw ups to nonsense, so that seems to be how we get this use of bollocks.

Nigel pointed out that bollocks isn't always bad in British English. They also have the mysterious phrases the bollocks and the dog's bollocks referring to something that is noticeably good. In American English we have parallel expressions like the cat's meow, the cat's pajamas and the cat's tits. Slightly shorter versions also sometimes appear­ That's the nuts meant "That's great" in American slang of the 1930s.

Miss Poubelle wasn't quite as sure where these expressions originated. But whatever is going on here, there must be something important about the use of the word the. To translate into American, it's bollocks means "it sucks"; it's the bollocks means "it rules." A funny parallel is found in recent American slang, where saying that something is shit means that it's terrible, while saying that it's the shit means it is the best. Apparently, the picks one thing out of a group that is worthy of attention or note. So the world is full of bollocks, nuts, and shit. But if we concentrate on one particular example and call it the bollocks, the nuts or the shit, we are saying that it's special and stands out from all the other bollocks, nuts and shit in the world.

She was beginning to try to work out where the cats and dogs came from, when Sebastian turned over and asked Miss Poubelle to apply sunscreen to his frontside. She was sufficiently distracted by his lovely set of bollocks to drop her dictionary, and etymological investigations took a less academic turn. More on the fascinating world of British bollocks in a future column....