I agree with James Joyce on the spelling ballocks. The Liberal Democrats made their MEPs wear T-shirts printed with ‘Bollocks to Brexit’ to the European parliament. But ballocks are to balls what hillocks are to hills.
An old word, it appears in a manuscript glossary from the early 10th century. To spell it bollocks is like spelling bastard as bastid, to which many walls bear witness. It appeared in the Oxford English Dictionary in 1885 under ballock, as it still does in Jonathon Green’s Dictionary of Slang. The OED notes, unsmilingly, that the spelling bollock ‘shows rounding’.
Also without a smile, it remarks that it is found ‘usually in the plural’.
The Irish often use ballocks to mean a blundering idiot, in the singular number: ‘I’m a ballocks,’ says Temple in Portrait of the Artist.
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