"Kybosh" as a tool or weapon? (1860)

[Stephen Goranson]

________________________________________
From: American Dialect Society [ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU] On Behalf Of Douglas G. Wilson [douglas at NB.NET]
Sent: Friday, July 02, 2010 11:17 PM
To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
Subject: [ADS-L] "Kybosh" as a tool or weapon? (1860)

 From N'archive:

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_Lloyd's Weekly London Newspaper_ (London), 14 Oct. 1860: p. 4:

[testimony in police court involving violence between clogmakers
apparently involved in a unionization dispute or the like]

<<I did not speak to Bamforth. I did not challenge him to fight, nor did
I strike him or knock him down. I know what a kybosh is (a laugh) It is
a piece of iron about a foot long; but I did not use one. .... He had a
kybosh in his hand, but he took it up in self-defence.>>

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Is this kybosh basically a sort of bludgeon? Is "kybosh" here a variant
or ancestor of "cosh"?

Or is this kybosh possibly some other type of implement -- perhaps a
clogmaker's tool -- which could double as a weapon?

-- Doug Wilson
*******
Thank you Doug. Evidently he refers to an implement for striking blows, one held in the hand. Compare, e.g. [at GB]:

Our trip to Egypt, by the author of 'The better way'.1859
It was a man bending over a ditch by the road-side, and who, with a large kurbash or hippopotamus' whip which he held in his hand, was belabouring some invisible object, from whom terrible screams were proceeding. ...

and
Sielanka: a forest picture, and other stories  1898
 By Henryk Sienkiewicz [translated from polish]
With terror she saw in the first luster of the morning Stas lying on the ground and above him a Bedouin with a kurbash in his hand. At the sight of this, she screamed with all her strength and stamped with her feet, and when the Bedouin ...

Stephen Goranson
http://www.duke.edu/~goranson

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