It seems that the idea of a banshee being a noisy spirit in torment has been extended so far it has snapped, most likely out of ignorance of what a banshee actually is, and probably through confusion with like a bandit, another American slang expression which came into the language at about the same time. A modern example is in Steven Levy’s Hackers, Heroes of the Computer Revolution of 1984: “An absurdly expensive musical instrument upon which you could improvise, compose, and, like the beatniks in Harvard Square a mile away, wail like a banshee with total creative abandon”.Įxamples in RHHDAS include party like a banshee and run like a banshee. The word banshee comes from the Irish bean sí (pronounced ban-shee) which translates as woman of the fairy mounds. The banshee roams the countryside and can be heard wailing when she predicts a death. This has often appeared in the set forms wail like a banshee or scream like a banshee. What is a Banshee ghost The banshee is a female spirit and is considered to be an omen of death. The basic phrase like a banshee has been used many times over the past couple of hundred years as a figurative expression to describe someone screaming or making a noise, usually in an excess of emotion. Now rather dated, it indicates something out of the ordinary or excessive. That being the case, I am really confused where the expression came from.Ī I’ve never heard the saying in the modern American slang sense - it hasn’t made it across the Atlantic into British English - but it is recorded in the Random House Historical Dictionary of American Slang, with a first example from 1976. According to tradition, the banshee creature can only cry for five major Irish families: the O’Neills, the O’Briens, the O’Connors, the O’Gradys, and the Kavanaghs. Q From Paul LeRoy in the USA: Have you ever heard the expression like a banshee, as in ‘He/she made out like a banshee’? I see the definition of the word banshee is a female spirit that would wail under a window sill of a house where someone was going to die. The Banshee, pronounced bean-sidhe is the woman of the fairies and may be an ancestral spirit appointed to forewarn members of certain ancient Irish families of their time of death.
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