I’ve written briefly a couple of times about the off-color term “bollocks,” originally meaning testicles and since used in all sorts of colorful ways. (The link is the more recent post, and it has a link to the previous one.) I recommend the comments on both, many of which are relate to how offensive the term has been, until fairly recently, in Britain.
I imagine that the move to acceptability occurred following the 1977 album Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols. The record company was actually brought to court on obscenity charges; it won. Incidentally, it appears that the album led to the change in the more common spelling of the word, from “ballocks” to “bollocks.” Check out this chart from Google Books Ngram Viewer, showing the incidence of the two words in British books:
As to the aforementioned “colorful ways,” here are just a few of the variants in the invaluable online resource Green’s Dictionary of Slang:
- ballocks in brackets
- big ballocks
- do one’s ballocks
- have his brains in his ballocks
- have one’s ballocks in the right place
- have someone/something by the ballocks/bollocks
- in one’s ballocks
- knock the ballocks out of
- not give a ballocks
My topic today stems from a video clip someone put on Twitter of the American MSNBC commentator Joy Reid:
In the clip, Reid says about the Trump campaign’s Tulsa rally (helpfully defining the term after using it), “They completely bollixed it. They completely messed it up.” New York Times reporter Tariq Panja commented, “Not heard the phrase ‘bollocksed it’ [more on the spelling issue in a minute] used on the news before, and certainly not in the US. But, it has to be said, she’s used it correctly here!”
Well, the fact is “bollix” is a common American verb of long standing, admittedly usually followed by the preposition “up.” Green’s Dictionary of Slang’s first citation is from a Purdue University publication in 1902; the next two also American (as are all citations through 1954):
(I’m struck that both Jerome Weidman and Arthur Kober were Jewish New Yorkers, as am I, and the term does have a suggestion to me of that milieu. However, my Yiddish expert friend Andrew Cassel tells me it doesn’t stem from that language; he says my feeling may stem from the fact that Yiddish has a great number of words denoting fouling things up or failing.)
The first British use in Green’s doesn’t come till 1960, in the Colin MacInnes novel Mr. Love and Justice: “I hope your private investigations haven’t b—d up the situation prematurely.” (The omitted letters indicate the offensiveness of the word.) And from then on, Irish and British uses are common, with spellings including “bollix,” “bollocks.” “bollox,” and “bollux.”
But why would “bollix up” have been established in America first, when all other forms of “ballocks” were much more widespread in Britain? I believe I know the answer, or at least part of it, and it has been suggested (though even there not accepted) only once before as far as I know, in a short article in 1949 in the academic journal Modern Language Notes. It’s this: American “bollix up” does not derive from “ballocks”=”testicles,” but rather from an older phrase with a different etymology, “ball up.” The OED‘s first definition: “Of a shoe (esp. a horseshoe), hoof, etc.: to become clogged with balls of mud, snow, or the like. Also with the horse as subject.” The dictionary has citations, all but one American, dating from 1760. This is from George Washington’s 1787 diary: “Apprehension of the Horses balling with the snow.”
And that verb led to this broader, exclusively American definition of “ball”: “To clog or tangle; to bring into a state of entanglement, confusion, or difficulty. Frequently as past participle, esp. in balled up.” An 1885 citation is from a Mark Twain letter: “It will ‘ball up’ the binderies again.”
It seems evident to me that that expression led to “bollix up” within a couple of decades — pace the OED, which gives a “ballocks” etymology. (Green’s is silent on the question.) The one thing I don’t know is why it took on the extra syllable. It may indeed have been a conscious or unconscious nod to “ballocks” (which was commonly used in the U.S. to refer to testicles, though mostly in a farming context). Or it may have have been merely to add emphasis. Either way, I’m convinced that America “bollix up” doesn’t principally derive from “ballocks.”
By contrast, the author of that 1949 article in Modern Language Notes, Thomas Pyle, contended that it did. Otherwise, he wrote, “the similarity in from and the identity in meaning taken together must be accounted a truly remarkable coincidence.” I’m going with remarkable coincidence.
There is one more wrinkle. The expression “balls-up,” meaning a blunder or error, shows up in an 1889 British dictionary of jargon and cant. Robert Graves used it in his 1929 World War I memoir, Goodbye to All That: “Tomorrow’s going to be a glorious balls-up.” Then it became a verb with the same meaning as “ball up”, no later than 1947, when Dan Devin used it in For the Rest of Our Lives, his novel about the New Zealand Expeditionary Force (N.Z.E.F.) in World War II: “: If only they haven’t ballsed up the bomb-line we gave them.” From then on it appears frequently in British and Australian texts.
And does “balls up” relate to “balls”=”testicles”? Without a doubt, yes.
notoneoffbritishisms.com 
In addition to its ‘nonsense’ meaning, a bollocking (noun) is a very severe reprimand eg I was given a bollocking. Is there an American equivalent to that?
Only thing that comes to mind is “dressing down.”
I am amazed to see the Google Books Ngram Viewer and read the entries from Green’s Dictionary of Slang. How can I have lived all my 56 years in Britain, consider myself well-read (and have mixed with the kind of company that use coarse language) and yet have never encountered the spelling ‘ballocks’ until this article?
Indeed. I remember coming across the word “ballocks” in Anthony Burgess’s Earthly Powers and deducing this must an older spelling as used by the elderly pretentious narrator. I read it in the early eighties and i don’t think I’d seen that spelling before. It was not a word you saw spelled often, but when I heard it pronounced in the sixties, it sounded “bollocks”.
To take this down a notch, “There is one more wrinkle.” in the context made me laugh out loud. Just one? (Sorry to go there!) Otherwise, as usual, well explained etymology and much appreciated.
Bollocks seems to be an acceptable word to use now instead of something more vulgar. I have heard ‘bollocks on stilts’ on the BBC Radio4 Today programme to describe something that is totally outrageous.
I would have taken McInnes’s “b—d” to mean “buggered” (but that may reflect my idiolect rather than McInnes’s).
Sorry, that should be MacInnes of course.
I remember reading somewhere that an early episode of The Flintstones included the word “bollocks” (or “bollix”) causing problems for the British broadcaster. I can’t remember exactly what happened, but I think nobody noticed it was there – it was a kids programme the broadcaster thought – until after it was shown, when there were complaints.
Thanks for this informative piece – it’s the dog’s bollocks!
The dogs bollocks, what a brilliant expression. Meaning great brilliant, the tops.And it has traveled.
Some years ago I went to the Wednesday flea market in Goa. A lad of about ten or twelve came up to me and started to try to persuade me to go into his parents’ stall. There was a bit of back and forth for a minute or so and then he came up with his “killer” sales pitch.
“Sir, sir, come into my shop please. I give you dogs bollocks prices”.
“What?” I said, trying not to laugh, “where did you learn language like that?”
“From English people sir, ” he replied with a big grin on his face.
Many believe the term dog’s bollocks comes from the popular 20th century toy Meccano.
There were originally two sets for sale in the 1920s – Box Standard and Box Deluxe.
Box Deluxe became dog’s bollcoks, meaning something of exceptional quality.
Box Standard became bog standard – a British saying meaning an item of average but useable quality.
Bollix is Irish. Ballocks is more Scottish in my mind (but also Northern English). Bollocks is more Southern English I think. (I have no idea what the Welsh say.)
If I saw b—- up in the extract above, I would have read *balls* up. No one I know would ever say “bollocks up” in place of “balls up”.
And I add myself to the previous commentators surprised that Google thinks it’s “ballocks”. Never heard anyone say that in the UK in my lifetime.
Agree entirely. I’ve never heard “bollocks” used as a verb in that sense, whereas “to balls something up” is common. Likewise “to bollock” as in “tell off”.
Google is charting the spelling “ballocks”/”bollocks,” not the pronunciation. How differently (if at all) would those two spellings be pronounced?
Quite different for me. Different vowel sound. Chambers gives “bollocks” the first vowel as in ‘hot’ and “ballocks” as in ‘bad’ which would agree with how I pronounce them. (And typing that, I discover that in my UK English spellchecker for Firefox, it doesn’t even have “ballocks”)
I am now reminded of a shaggy dog story that I heard back when the Sex Pistols album came out, involving someone smuggling cattle on a ship with some tipsy birds. The punchline was “Never mind the bullocks, here’s the six pissed owls.”
I’m no linguist, so can’t use IPA symbols 🙂
If I saw “Ballocks” I’d pronounce it “Bal” as in “Balance”. But that’s because I’d see the “ocks” and guess that it would be pronounced analogous to “Bollocks” where the “Bol” is like “Bolted”.
There is of course a “carry-on” leveraging of the plumbing item “Ballcocks” to add to the mix, complete with “Oo err Missis, saucy !” type raised eyebrows.
Then there’s the fixture on a rowing boat to hold the oars: “rowlocks”. Pronounced to rhyme with “bollocks” to the delight of schoolchildren through the ages.
And then there’s the Robert Graves poem “Lollocks”.
Drifting slightly off topic, it’s interesting how English spelling tends to keep the “cks” form, but (as your example demonstrates) there’s an equally valid “-x” form … probably a Dutch thing, like “Hendricks”/”Hendrix” ?
I’ve never come across ballocks, but I imagine the difference in pronunciation would be very subtle, if at all, unlike bullocks.
Oh yes, you’ll hear ‘bollocked it up’, ‘ballsed it up’ and ‘bolloxed it up’ in the UK and Australia, all meaning the same thing, someone’s stuffed up really bad. But it’s cool hearing Americans saying it, lol.
Woo hoo, go Team Bollocks!
Tiny correction: the author of “For The Rest Of Our Lives” is Dan Davin, not Dan Devin – he’s from the New Zealand province I grew up in. Otherwise, this post is the dog’s bollocks!
I’ve noticed ‘bollocks’ being used for ‘testicles’ in the US as well as the U.K. but with less frequency. A major difference is the way the final syllable is often pronounced literally as an elongated ‘o’ sound rather than an ‘u’ though, as is ‘buttocks’. Think about the way Forrest Gump says ‘I was shot in the buttAHcks’