What Is The Origin Of (170)?…
Kip
If you sleep the recommended eight hours a day, then you will have been kipping for a third of your life. We use kip to describe sleep or the act of sleeping. It can be used as a noun, as in “Get some kip” or are an intransitive verb, as in “they kipped in the barn.” But where does kip come from? The answer is, probably, from Denmark via Ireland.
The suspect for the word’s ultimate origin is the Danish word kippe which meant a hut or a low sort of alehouse, the type of which I like to frequent. However, by the time it got to Ireland it was a slang term for a brothel. James Joyce, in Ulysses, one of the world’s greatest books that few us have ever read, published in 1922, Leopold Bloom responds to the androgynous prostitute, Bella Cohen, “I saw him, kipkeeper! Pox and gleet vendor!” In his collection of oral history entitled Dublin Tenement Life, published in 1994, Kevin Corrigan reports the following contribution; “Now we didn’t call them madams, the outsiders called them madams. We called them kip-keepers. The houses that they lived in were called kips.” Alternative variants in Dublin slang for brothels were kip-house and kip-shop.
The word first appeared in English literature in Oliver Goldsmith’s The Vicar of Wakefield, published in 1766. “My business was to attend him at auctions,” he wrote, “.. to take the left hand in his chariot when not filled by another, and to assist at tattering a kip, as the phrase was, when we had a mind for a Frolic.” Goldsmith was Irish and educated in Dublin and almost certainly this is where he picked up this piece of vernacular. A later commentator noted that tattering a kip describe the act of smashing up a house of ill-repute.
By the time the word had crossed the Irish Sea to mainland Britain in the 19th century it had lost its specific association with prostitution and came to refer to a common lodging-house or, more specifically, a bed in such a house and then, by extension, a bed in general. So by 1879 we find, in the MacMillan Magazine, “so I went home, turned into kip.” However, in parallel was its usage as a form of lodging house as can be seen from the edition of Pall Mall Magazine for 27th September 1883; “The next alternative is the common lodging-house or kip, which, for the moderate sum of fourpence, supplies the applicant with a bed.” Similarly, in Round London, published between 1893 and 1896, kip is used to describe a doss-house; “the sort of life that was led in kips, or doss-houses.”
We have noted before in our etymological explorations the tendency for a verb to develop from a noun. This trend still continues, the most egregious example, to my mind, is the sports commentators use of to medal to refer to some sportsperson who is likely to end up in a medal-winning position. So early in the 20th century kip began to appear as a verb meaning to sleep, the activity associated with mainland, but not Irish, kips. Nowadays, kip is used exclusively to denote the act of sleeping without any reference to brothels or doss-houses.
An interesting transformation, to be sure.
