Nix

Filed Under January 2008, columns 

Dear Word Detective: I’m pretty certain I’ve heard the word “nix” many times now. I know it means “to reject or veto,” but I was wondering about the origin of the word, and whether or not it has anything to do with Nixon. — Toni-Marie.

Now that’s what I call temptation. Given another cup of coffee and a half-dozen oatmeal cookies, I could probably cook up an eminently plausible scenario of how Richard Nixon’s name became a verb meaning “to reject.” I could even drag poor little Checkers into it. However, as President Nixon himself once (supposedly) put it, “that would be wrong.” Besides, G. Gordon Liddy is still out there somewhere, and I’m not really up for a replay of the isolated farmhouse scene in “Marathon Man.”

So, are we all back from looking up Checkers on Wikipedia yet? To cut to the chase,”nix” has nothing to do with Richard Milhous Nixon, 37th President of the United States. As a matter of fact, “nix” as a verb meaning “to reject or refuse” was in common use in the US by 1903, ten years before Nixon was born.

But even if Dick had been up and running when the verb “nix” first appeared, Leon Jaworski (back to Wikipedia, kids) couldn’t have pinned the word on him. “Nix,” meaning (as the Oxford English Dictionary puts it) “To cancel, reject, forbid, refuse (a thing or person); to deny (a request); to criticize (a film, book, etc.),” is not the original spelling of the word. “Nix” is a colloquial simplified form of the German word “nichts,” meaning “nothing.”

“Nix” actually first appeared in English as a noun in the late 18th century, and by the late 19th century postal clerks in the US were calling undeliverable pieces of mail “nixies.” The noun form of “nix” cropped up in various catch phrases in the 19th century, and by 1902 the phrase “nix on,” meaning “no more of, enough of” (”Nix on the pie — I feel sick”), was current. As an interjection, “nix” was also used as a warning by children (”Nix! The principal is coming!”).

Although well-established in US popular speech at one time, “nix” has been fading from use for the past few generations (which is probably why the Democrats never pushed “Nix on Nixon” as a slogan). But “nix” lives on in “Pig Latin,” a mock language once popular among children and imaginative adults (and still occasionally heard on The Simpsons). In Pig Latin, the first letter of any word beginning with a consonant is shifted to the end and followed by “ay,” so “puzzle” becomes “uzzlepay.” Words beginning with vowels simply have “ay” or “way” appended (”etgay outway”). The Pig Latin form of “nix,” which is “ixnay,” has remained enormously popular (along with “amscray” from “scram”), and searching Google for “ixnay on the” produces more than 140,000 hits, many of them probably produced by people who have no idea that they’re speaking Pig Latin. As a matter of fact, even Google itself can be found rendered in Pig Latin (http://www.google.com/intl/xx-piglatin/).

 

 

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