Well, almost (I know, I keep teasing you!) The title is, of course, a rip off of Monty Python’s brilliant Parrot Sketch. After reading essays for five hours (and a couple more hours to go), it’s about the height of intellectual activity that I can handle at the moment, so the best I could do for Friday’s Word of the Week is to find different ways of saying done! Finished! Over! Ended! Completed! With the submission of final grades over the weekend, I shall be putting the semester to rest, sending it up the river, kicking it to the curb, and, my personal favorite, putting the kibosh on it.

As far as I can tell, no one really knows the true origin of the phrase to put the kibosh on something. The most popular theories put its origins with Yiddish, Scots Gaelic, Irish Gaelic, and Turkish. It is generally accepted, at least, that it first appeared in print in London newspapers in 1834 and spread from there. Continue reading →