more information on the kibosh, qirbach, kurbash

[Joel S. Berson]

At 6/22/2010 05:36 PM, victor steinbok wrote:
>There is an 1830 NY Med Journal as well. I'll post it later--I don't
>want to start the search from scratch on a different computer, so I'll
>pick it up when I get back to mine. The reference is to travels in the
>Middle East. There is no explanatory note on the term either which
>hardly suggests that it was "hardly well-known".

The above seems to be about R. R. Madden, author of the two books I
noted -- which were published in 1829 and 1830, thus only a short
while before the NY Med Journal.  Interestingly, that article says
"At Cairo, Mr. Madden visited the lunatic asylum ..." (p. 408).  The
quotation I found via EAN (earlier message here) was --

>1835 July 15, the Rhode-Island Republican, page 2 (at least three
>times, once misspelled).  An article titled "Horrors of the Cario
>[sic] Lunatic Asylum."
>
>"... the keeper armed himself with a courbash, (a whip, made of one
>solid thong of the hide of the hipdopotamus,) ..." [sic; inverted "p"].

Thus I surmise the RI Republican article was taken from one of
Madden's books, 5 or 6 years after publication.

Does all this indicate wide appeal of works about the Near East, and
wide knowledge of the "courbash"?  A purely speculative question,
meant to induce further investigation by others than myself.  :-)

Joel


>VS-)
>
>On Tue, Jun 22, 2010 at 4:28 PM, Joel S. Berson <Berson at att.net> wrote:
> >
> > At 6/22/2010 10:26 AM, Michael Quinion wrote:
> >>This new early example of the term is extremely interesting. However, I'm
> >>not persuaded that the suggested origin in a Middle Eastern instrument of
> >>torture can be supported by it. It is clear from the earliest examples
> >>that "kibosh" was a slang term of the London streets. The whip, and its
> >>name, were hardly well-known even among educated people in 1835.
> >
> > Google Books does yield a few hits from British books and magazines
> > for "courbash" between 1829 and 1835  -- and none any earlier.  (I
> > have not tried to vet all these dates, and some, particularly the
> > journals, may be false.)  Two are books by Richard Robert
> > Madden.  The Westminster Review article, which is Oct. 1830, is
> > titled "Novels and Travels in Turkey" and is a review of four books,
> > one being one of Madden's books.
> >
> > But who am I to say whether this made "courbash" common among
> Cockneys by 1835.
> >
> > Joel
>
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The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org