etymology - How old is "Bollocks!"?


As a non-English native it took me years to grow up and understand, what meant "Never Mind the Bollocks" as the title of Sex Pistols album. Using "bollocks" as "rubbish", "crap" or what so ever took much more. And after that I somehow automatically bound "bollocks!" with Sex Pistols. Suddenly I understood, that it is so just in my world. Or isn't? Is there some etymology of the idiom(?) ? How old it is in English?



Answer



The spelling "bollocks" is actually rather recent, the most common spelling before the mythic Sex Pistols' single was actually "ballocks". Further back in time the Old English form was "bealluc" (testicles) - from Old English "Beallu" (ball).


Ælfric (a prolific writer whose works are an important source for Old English) uses the term "beallucas" c. 1000 (this was absolutely not vulgar at the time and he also happily uses "ars").


Personally I'm tempted to conjecture that there might also have been some Norman influence because the French version is "Balloches" (small balls) and it's still used very commonly in French under this form for testicles (colloquial, not vulgar). "Alors ? T'as rien dans les balloches ?" (So ? Got nothing in the balls ?).


In addition, the surname "Baloche" (cf. the America Singer) is specifically rooted in Normandy. This time there is no allusion to the testicles. The origin instead is that "Balochers" were people in charge of a particular type of balance in which the weights were made of small balls.


It might well as well be the other way round however, because whereas the use of Baloche for balance is well attested in medieval French, its use (as "Balloches" with double 'L') for testicles seems to be a later English borrowing.


I'd definitely be interested if some OE or OF specialist could shed more light regarding what I surmise could be mutual influence.


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