‘Lucky might get going all of a sudden. Then we’d be banjaxed.’ (Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot)
Banjaxed and bockety are a fun pair of words in the Irish English vernacular. Banjaxed I heard from an early age; bockety was not in my west-of-Ireland dialect, but I adopted it later for occasional use.
The words have similar but distinct meanings.
If something is banjaxed, it’s ruined, broken, confounded, or shattered (including in the ‘tired’ sense; cf. killed in Irish slang). It’s often applied to damaged or destroyed machines – vehicles, phones, computers, household appliances – or their parts. It can apply to people, if they’re injured or drunk, for example, or to abstractions like plans or systems.
If something is bockety, it’s physically unsteady, impaired, or imperfect. It’s more likely to be usable than if it’s banjaxed: a bockety chair or bicycle might wobble but function, whereas a banjaxed one is not to be trusted, if it can be used at all. Body parts are often bockety too. I’ll return to this word later.
This car in David Mach‘s installation The Oligarch’s Nightmare, pictured at the Galway Arts Festival 2023, is well and truly banjaxed. And that wheel looks fierce bockety.
The origins of banjaxed (occasionally bandjaxed) are uncertain. The OED says it was ‘perhaps originally Dublin slang’, which doesn’t get us far, while the Oxford Dictionary of Modern Slang speculates that it was formed by association with banged, bashed, and smashed. Maybe.
Green’s Dictionary of Slang suggests that the noun banjax was a semi-euphemism of ballocks. Dave Wilton, at Wordorigins.org, writes that it’s a short leap from ballocks as a verb meaning ‘make a mess’ to banjax with a similar sense. (See my post on ballocks/bollocks/bollox/bollix at Strong Language for more on that word.)
Banjax(ed) has always felt vaguely rude to me, bordering obscurely on vulgarity; etymology might underlie this feeling. There’s also a bilingual pun about banjax being the ladies’ toilet, since bean /’bæn/ is Irish Gaelic for ‘woman’, and jacks is Irish English slang for ‘bathroom’.
The noun banjax, which may predate the verb, appears in Seán Ó Casey’s 1920s play Juno and the Paycock: ‘I’m tellin’ you the scholar, Bentham, made a banjax o’ th’ Will.’ Wiktionary defines it as ‘a mess or undesirable situation made as a result of incompetence’ – I’d qualify the subordinate phrase with a ‘sometimes’.
Banjax (v.) appears in a few major dictionaries, including Merriam-Webster, American Heritage, Green’s, and Collins, which notes the common connotations of incompetence. It usually occurs in the form banjaxed (i.e., as a past participle or participial adjective). Some Irish writers are especially fond of it, like Edna O’Brien:
Van Gogh knew a thing or two, but think what it did to his brain, banjaxed it. (Johnny I Hardly Knew You)
‘Emma had suggested that you hide, said your presence might banjax her position.’ (A Pagan Place)
‘Say the separating machine got banjaxed up at the creamery,’ Morgan said. (‘Tough Men’, in The Love Object)
and Flann O’Brien:
The torture had him banjaxed altogether. (The Hard Life)
‘Michael Gilhaney,’ said the Sergeant, ‘is an example of a man that is nearly banjaxed from the principle of the Atomic Theory. Would it astonish you to hear that he is nearly half a bicycle?’ (The Third Policeman)
They drive away the roller and here is his black heart sitting there as large as life in the middle of the pulp of his banjaxed corpse. They couldn’t crush his heart! (At Swim-Two-Birds)
Green’s has further citations, mostly from Irish writers.
Mark Davies’s GloWbE corpus highlights banjax* as an example of Irish dialect: 59 of its 77 hits are from Irish English, 52 of them for banjaxed. And of the 16 British ones, several are duplicates or appear on Arseblog, a blog about Arsenal football club written by an Irishman.
Banjaxed shows up in Scottish English too, sometimes in high-profile places. In the rebooted Star Trek film from 2009, Scotty describes the shield emitters as ‘totally banjaxed’.
Banjaxed objects in GloWbE include body parts (my arm, my right knee, her knees, Robbie Keane’s Achilles heel), machines and tech (websites, rental bikes, a car), and physical objects (bed, door lock). Anatomical/medical references proved popular in the pandemic, as the Coronavirus Corpus shows:
I was as banjaxed by the coronavirus as anyone else. [source, NZ]
But there undoubtedly are a number of people whose lives have been banjaxed by the thing. [source]
That means tens of thousands of those will go on to be rendered banjaxed by Long Covid. [source]
Most of all, abstract entities are banjaxed, often of a political or structural nature: Ireland, the country, the economy, our banking system, the country’s accounts, etc. Country is the most frequent collocate: ‘the country is banjaxed’, ‘the party that banjaxed the country’, etc.
Finally, a fun piece of trivia: banjaxed was Terry Wogan’s favourite word:
Which explains this:
*
Now for bockety. Loaned directly from Irish bacaidí /’bɑkəd̪i/, it’s a synonym of bacach /’bɑkəx/, both of which, as far as I know, can function as an adjective, meaning ‘lame’, ‘halting’, ‘imperfect’, or as a noun, meaning ‘lame person’ (or ‘mean person’, ‘sponger’, etc.).
The adjectival use of bockety is more common, and is the only use listed in the OED. The first of two closely related senses is dated to 1842, the second to 1902, though I doubt that’s the final word:
1. Of a person: unable to walk without difficulty; infirm, lame. Also of a body part: injured, impaired.
2. That has fallen into a state of disrepair; likely to fall apart or break down; rickety, ramshackle.
A search on Irish forum boards.ie shows the popularity of reference to body parts: there are bockety legs, knees, feet, hips, backs, ovaries, heads, teeth, and entire bodies. There’s often a sense of long-term impairment or gradual deterioration, whereas a banjaxed body part tends to indicate a more sudden or severe injury. At least that’s my intuition.
Bockety often refers to everyday objects, such as wheels, bicycles, furniture, or other parts of a home that have fallen into disrepair but may remain functional. If only barely: Mary McAleese, president of Ireland in 1997–2011, writes in her memoir of ‘a bockety office chair’ that would ‘lurch suddenly to the left and throw me onto the floor’.
OED aside, bockety is absent from mainstream dictionaries but appears in Irish English ones, whose examples refer to a bockety sign, chair leg, and hay rick (A Dictionary of Hiberno-English by T.P. Dolan) and a bockety wardrobe, pig’s bladder (used as a football), and hoor (a quasi-derogatory term usually applied to men) (Slanguage by Bernard Share).
I last saw it in the wild a few weeks ago, when I caught up on a long, comic article about the Metaverse in New York Magazine by Paul Murray, author of the award-winning Skippy Dies and The Bee Sting:
. . . the unlovable lo-fi graphics and interpersonal randomness can give Horizon Worlds a kind of a perverse, bockety charm. Unlike Twitter or Instagram, there’s no scope to broadcast your brand here; everybody’s just thrown together, like at a ’90s music festival with no music.
Other examples that I’ve seen by Irish authors include:
The door had been wedged open by a bockety chair on which was sellotaped a hand-scrawled sign: ART THIS WAY. (Doireann Ní Ghríofa, A Ghost in the Throat)
I won’t see you riding your bockedy bike (Pat Ingoldsby, ‘For Hughie’, in Salty Water)
. . . we were admitted to a room that felt like an oul’ one’s tiny parlour: a red formica-topped table, a couple of battered kitchen chairs, the smell of cooking oil and boiled cabbage and stale smoke, an old Bakelite radio set on a bocketty occasional table.” (Declan Hughes, All the Dead Voices)
You may have noticed the three spellings (bockety, bockedy, bocketty) in those three uses: a not unusual degree of variation in an anglicized Irish loanword – see my post on mar dhea for notes on this.
GloWbE has just 4 hits for bockety (none for the variant spellings), referring to spectacles, roads, and pop music (bockety pop is a microgenre I’m unfamiliar with). The iWeb corpus has 18, though 8 refer to the Sarah Argent play The Bockety World of Henry & Bucket, about ‘two friends who live in a bockety world of discarded objects’.
Also featured in iWeb are a bockety shopping cart, table, framework, cage, beads, stairs, mobile phone, and bicycle – which is banjaxed too: Róisín Ingle’s Irish Times article on cycling begins thus:
I’ve been freewheeling around Dublin town since the red letter day aged eight or nine when I inherited a thoroughly banjaxed third-hand bike that once had belonged to several older brothers or sisters. It was blue and bockety, the saddle leather battered and worn, the chain creaky and in need of a good dose of 3-in-1 oil, but it was mine, all mine.
Which brings us full, bockety circle. To see us out, here’s a video of a dog named Bockety and their pal helping a farmer plant potatoes in County Kerry. Absolute full marks for Irishness.
https://stancarey.wordpress.com/2024/03/15/banjaxed-and-bockety-words-in-ireland/
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