Word: kibosh
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...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...
...traveled the same distance. Hemingway wrote pieces for New Masses (he was praised because his style resembled Lenin's!), starred at writers' congresses, where he helped the party put the kibosh on Trotskyites, and called himself a "loyal man of the left." But he traveled no farther than Spain. No ideologue, he never accepted the Marxist doublethink that enabled so many others to blind themselves to the Communists' secret-police tactics, and in For Whom the Bell Tolls he conveyed some of his disillusionment, to the anguish of his left-wing admirers. Dos Passos considered joining...
...weakness was a frightening susceptibility to end sweeps and, granted that Columbia has no backs to match the ones Harvard saw racing around at Palo Alto, a similar defensive flaw today could easily put the kibosh on the Crimson's hopes for its first victory of the season. The Lions turned the Amherst ends with relative ease last week. Today their first string fullback, who was ineligible for the Lord Jeff game, will be available and at the same time the Harvard line will not be at full strength...
...effect, Murray was putting the kibosh on the eight years of pleas and proposals to merge the A.F. of L. and C.I.O. Murray now proposed: let's fight side by side for prolabor legislation, and forget about reunions. Phil Murray was obviously not worried about C.I.O.'s future-not only because of its 5,000,000 membership but on account of its proved political power at the polls. And Murray also believed that C.I.O. ambitions for vast, industry-wide bargaining units could never be reconciled with the old-line A.F. of L. craft-union idea...