berk

   A British slang word, in occasional use, which is now taken to mean fool, though it was originally rather a stronger term of abuse. Its origin lies in Cockney rhyming slang, where ‘Berkshire’ or ‘Berkeley Hunt’ was used for ‘cunt’. The Sleepers of Erin, by Jonathan Gash, has many examples of ‘you burke’. “you stupid burke’, ‘you thick burke’, ‘you crass burke’, but this spelling is erroneous. There was certainly a slang term in former times, ‘to burke someone’, which meant to kill someone by strangulation or suffocation, but this was always a verb and at no time indicated foolishness. It derived from a notorious criminal who was executed in 1829. William Burke, an Irish navvy, together with his accomplice William Hare, murdered many victims in order to supply bodies to an Edinburgh surgeon, Dr Robert Knox. In The Sleepers of Erin the character who uses ‘you burke’ and its variants equates the term with ‘lunatic’, ‘cretin’. ‘goon’, ‘loon’, and ‘nerk’ at various times.