The Knackered Hackette has, once again, spent too much time in the dictionary. She writes…

I had a niggling feeling that the about section didn’t offer a full and fair definition of “knackered”, so will attempt to set that right here. Non-philologists and those of a squeamish or prudish disposition should look away now.

There’s an illuminating investigation of the term at World Wide Words, offering connections to sixteenth century bridle-makers — “knackers” — and trinkets that gather dust on the mantelpiece — “knick-knacks”. It continues:-

But there’s another slang sense of knackers, for the t*sticles, which grew up a little later, possibly also from knack, but possibly from yet another sense of knacker, that of castanets (which could be an altered form of knockers, but might come from an obsolete sense of knack, to knock or to make a sharp, abrupt noise). To knacker, therefore, is to castrate.”

Ouch!

In case you haven’t seen it yet, this might be a good time to view one of Pixar’s precursors to Toy Story, Knick Knack. This short concerns a frustated snowman encased in a holiday souvenir snow-globe on top of a bookcase who is trying to get out in order to canoodle with the pretty girl on the seaside ornament nearby. It’s a wonderful combination of the knick-knack as decorative object and the knackered, broken or even castrated (metaphorically speaking).

World Wide Words also reminds us that “cream crackered” is British rhyming slang for knackered. If you haven’t encountered a cream cracker, it’s a pale, bland, square, savoury biscuit that’s often enjoyed under English cheese, and is famously employed by Aardman Animations’ character Wallace to partake of a nice bit of Wensleydale. Jacob’s, a Liverpool company, cooked up the original cream cracker recipe way back in 1885. But why should cream crackers be associated with being exhausted?

Cockneys in East London (the Alma Mater of British rhyming slang) have been conjuring up colourful phrases for at least as long as Jacob’s has been making crackers. There’s a theory that the slang originated in the market place so that vendors/thieves could communicate with each other without their customers/policemen understanding. For such purposes of obfuscation,the slang and the item described frequently bore no association beyond the rhyme itself. Tidily enough, it looks like “Jacob’s crackers” (or simply “Jacobs”) is one of many cockney euphemisms for the aforementioned male appendages. There’s also “Berlin walls”, “cobbler’s awls”, “coffee stalls”, “Niagara falls”, “orchestra stalls”, and “Royal Albert Halls”.

If your interest has been awakened, here’s a fairly comprehensive and fruity list of cockney rhyming slang phrases, with new ones apparently being coined all the time. To “Wallace and Gromit” is to vomit (presumably after too much cheese and crackers), and there’s one further knackered reference: to be “Kerry Packered”. Clearly there’s no obvious connection between this slang and its meaning, because just why an Australian multi-millionaire media magnate should be linked to brokenness and exhaustion is beyond me.

Related Posts

1. how “chippy” do you like your ice cream?
2. no more coughing hacks
3. nobody knows anything (football version)