yogibogeybox

English

Etymology

Compound of yogi +‎ bogey +‎ box. Coined by Irish novelist and poet James Joyce in his 1922 novel Ulysses.

Noun

yogibogeybox (plural yogibogeyboxes)

1. A container for a spiritualist’s accessories.
   • 1968, John Anthony Burgess Wilson, Urgent Copy, page 63:

     Yeats, like AE, though not so fatuously, stood for the whirlpool, Madame Blavatsky and the yogibogeybox.

   • 1972, Richard Ellmann Goldsmith, Ulysses on the Liffey, →ISBN, page 16:

     For him the yogibogeybox could offer nothing so good as the vegetable world.

   • 1981, Alexander Theroux, Darconville's cat, page 199:

     "They are saying" — it was Prof. Fewstone, of course, sidling up to Miss Thisbite with his overfilled shirt and yogibogeybox-shaped head, the strange hairdressing of which gave him a big roach in front and a curled effect at the rear which he tucked under in a roll.

   • 1990, Benjamin Lawrence Reid, Necessary lives: biographical reflections, page 109:

     There is a period during which the children hear their mother denouncing "that woman" through closed doors, but the rival turns out to be only Mary Baker Eddy, in whose Boston yogibogeybox Walter had at last found a spiritual home.

   • 2011, M. Norris, Virgin and Veteran Readings of Ulysses, →ISBN:

     Ellmann reports a more elaborate and nastier prank that Joyce and Gogarty actually perpetrated in the 'yogibogeybox' rooms of the Hermetic Society on Dawson Street, and he attributes to this prank the historical A.E.'s refusal to include Joyce in his 1904 collection titled New Songs, a Lyric Selection; Made by AE from Poems by Padraic Colum, Eva Gore-Booth, thomas Koehler, Alice Milligan, Susant Mitchell, Seamus O'Sullivan, George Roberts, and Ella Young (Gifford 212).

   • 2012, Fran Brearton, Alan Gillis, The Oxford Handbook of Modern Irish Poetry, →ISBN, page 30:

     In a word, the 1898 Literary Ideals in Ireland discussion of French Symbolism exposed Yeats's Magic in Ireland, where it was as suspect as Russell's yogibogeybox Mysticism was harmless.