Despite the best efforts of linguists, researchers and lexicographers, a collection of words exists whose origins cannot be – and probably never will be – unequivocally explained. Ten such words, many of which began as colloquialisms or slang terms, are listed here along with their potential or most probable etymologies.
Perhaps surprisingly for such a familiar word, the origin of bloke remains a complete mystery; amongst several possible derivations and linguistic connections are the Romany or Hindi word loke (meaning ‘man’), the Celtic word ploc (‘large or stubborn person’) and an old Dutch word bloc (meaning ‘fool’). What is known is that the word can be traced back as far as the nineteenth century in English, and is believed by some sources to have developed as a slang term amongst London criminals in the early 1800s, when it seems to have first implied an owner, a master or a judge, with the more general sense of simply a ‘man’ developing shortly afterwards.
First appearing in English in the early nineteenth century, the word bogus was originally a noun rather than an adjective, and was used to refer to the machinery or apparatus used to make counterfeit currency. In this sense, the word has its origins in American slang, but its precise derivation before then is unclear. Of a number of attempted explanations, perhaps the most likely is that it is a shortened form of the earlier word tantrabogus, used in eighteenth- to nineteenth-century New England as a term for any odd-looking object, which is in turn probably derived from tantrabobs, an old West Country name for the Devil.
The earliest recorded use of the word cocktail in English dates back to the mid-1500s, when it was used to refer to a horse with a ‘cocked-tail’, that is to say, an intentionally shortened or docked tail that was often left as a stump sticking upwards like that of a cockerel. In reference to a mixed alcoholic drink, however, the word did not appear until the early 1800s, and in this sense the origin of the word is a mystery. It could be that the two meanings here are related, the implication being that the alcoholic content of a cocktail gives the drink a ‘kick’ at the end, much like that of the horse’s upturned tail. Alternatively, the two forms could be entirely separate, in which case cocktail could be a derivative of the French word for an eggcup, coquetier, implying that such drinks would once have been measured out or served in small, individual cups. Either way, the history of the word remains a complete mystery.
Meaning ‘nonsense’ or ‘garbage’, the word codswallop can be dated no further back than the mid-1900s in English, and is first attested in a 1959 edition of the BBC comedy series Hancock’s Half Hour. Like a number of other humorous English terms – including shenaningans, flabbergast and balderdash – the origin of codswallop is a mystery, although a variety of different suggestions have been proposed. Amongst the most elaborate of these is the notion that codswallop is derived from the name of the nineteenth-century English engineer Hiram Codd, who in 1872 patented a type of bottle that uniquely used a marble to form a perfect seal against a rubber washer in the neck, which quickly became a widely used container for bottled mineral water and other soft drinks in the late Victorian era. Wallop, meanwhile, is recorded in the 1930s as a slang term for alcohol, and so the implication is that codswallop was originally a drinker’s name for bottled water, or else any poor-quality beer or liquor. As convenient as this explanation first appears, however, the eight decades between the invention of Codd’s bottle and the first recorded use of codswallop casts doubt on its likelihood.
Today used to refer to a trick or contrivance, typically one intended to grab attention or garner publicity, the word gimmick dates from the 1920s in English when it was originally used as another name for a gadget or similar small device, and in particular one used to cheat in gambling or with which a magician performs his trick. The word first developed in American slang, but its precise etymology remains unknown – one potential derivation claims that it was originally formed as an anagram of ‘magic’, gimac, whilst another suggests that it is just an alteration of the much earlier term gimcrack, meaning a ‘showy but trifling object’.
Amongst the Scout Movement, it is popularly held that the founder of the movement, Sir Robert Baden-Powell, invented the word jamboree for the first International Rally of Boy Scouts held in London in 1920. Baden-Powell, it is claimed, either created the word at random or else based it on some existing obscure word – such as the Swahili word for ‘hello’, jambo, or the Aboriginal Australian word for a meeting or loud celebrating, corroboree – of which he presumably had some knowledge. This explanation, however, cannot be correct as the word jamboree predates the formation of even the first of Baden-Powell’s scout groups in 1907 by almost forty years, with its first recorded use in reference to rowdy celebration taken from an article in the New York Herald dating from 1868.
The origin of OK is one of the most famous mysteries in whole of the English language, with dozens of different explanations of its history having been suggested over the years. Amidst the most fanciful (and the least likely) of these explanations is that OK derives from the French phrase aux quais (meaning ‘to the docks’), which was once written on crates of exported cotton; Aux Cayes, a Haitian port from where good-quality rum was once imported; Oberkommando (‘High Command’), a phrase used on communications endorsed the German head of the American Continental Army in the 1700s; okeh, a Native American Choctaw word meaning ‘it is’; and even och aye, the familiar Scottish expression. Of all potential explanations here, however, the most likely appears to be that OK grew from a popular fad, traced back to the street slang of cities like Boston and New York in the 1830s, for abbreviating humorous misspellings of commonly used phrases: OK was probably an abbreviation of ‘orl korrect’, whilst NC was used to mean ‘nuff ced’, and KG meant ‘know go’. As short-lived as this fad appears to have been, OK apparently survived its demise and in 1840 it was used as an electoral slogan by the US President Martin van Buren, whose nickname ‘Old Kinterhook’ (the name of his hometown) was abbreviated by his Democrat supporters to ‘OK’. Although this history is generally taken as the most likely today, realistically even this can only be considered a best guess.
The first recorded reference to the game of snooker in English dates from an 1889 book called The Art of Practical Billiards for Amateurs, in which it is described as a game ‘which is not yet generally known, or much played’. The word snooker itself, however, predates this association with the game and was recorded in the 1870s as a jocular name for a newly enlisted army recruit. Where this word is originally derived from, and quite why the game should be so called are both unknown, although one suggestion popularly claims that whilst serving in India in 1875, it was Colonel Sir Neville Chamberlain (not the British Prime Minister, but rather a former British Army officer and Inspector-General of the Royal Irish Constabulary) who first applied the name to this variety of billiards, presumably jokingly highlighting another player’s amateurishness or lack of experience of the game.
Meaning ‘a very long time’, the word yonks was first recorded in English in the 1960s. Popular in British English but almost unheard of in North American varieties, the word is of unknown origin but is perhaps formed from an alteration of the colloquial phrase ‘donkey’s years’ (which is in turn based on the rhyming slang donkey’s ears). Alternatively, it could be an approximate combination of the word ‘years’, ‘months’ and ‘weeks’.
Besides presumably being related to the earlier equivalent German word zickzack (used to refer to a zigzagging ditch or trench around a fort intended to be harder for the enemy to see into), little of any assurance is known of the origin of the word zigzag, which dates back to the eighteenth century in English. It has been tentatively suggested that the word zigzag itself is merely intended to be a representation of its meaning, the shape of the letter Z and the change of vowel in each neighbouring syllable said to imply the alternating lines of a zigzag, but no assured explanation of its origin has yet been determined.