Word: kibosh
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...first cost-cutting moves, Jimmy Carter put the kibosh on all those Government-financed portraits that hang in the halls of Washington. They just weren't the sort of thing taxpayers should spend money on, said Jimmy. Last week the Commerce Department unveiled its answer to the President: a life-size painting of Elliot Richardson, done by the former Commerce Secretary himself. An inveterate doodler, Richardson, who also served as Attorney General in the Richard Nixon administration until the infamous Saturday Night Massacre, loaded his self-portrait with symbolism. He is painted into a corner, Richardson pointed...
...sound is absent in both Gaelic and Brooklynese, in which it becomes a hard / or d (as in da dame wid tin legs). Some classic Brooklyn expressions, he adds, come directly from the Gaelic: whudda card (joker) is a corruption of caird (an itinerant tramp); put da kibosh on it (put an end to it) comes from caip baish, or cap of death, a facecloth that inhabitants of southwest Ireland placed over a corpse...
Even Griffith, who spent many years as a Brooklyn teacher, once placed a sign above his blackboard admonishing: "There's no joy in Jersey." But Griffith takes no pride in having helped put the kibosh on the dialect. "Brooklynese had a bluntness and homeliness," he says. "There is a real joy in variety. Now we're becoming phonetically homogeneous." And that, as they used to say in Brooklyn, is for da boids...