A woman calls on behalf of her 12-year-old son, who wants to know the origin of the term “booby trap.” No, the hosts explain, the answer has nothing to do with brassieres. What about these strange fellows? This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Booby Traps”
Hello, you have A Way with Words.
Hi, this is Karen from KD, Texas.
What’s on your mind, Karen?
Well, my 12-year-old son had a question that I thought, this is right up your guys’ alley. He asked me where the name booby trap originated.
Oh, boy.
Let me ask you, did your son have any theories about that?
Well, no, but I told him it was named after the inventor, Edward Booby, and he didn’t go for that.
Did you see that in Wikipedia or something?
No, I just made it up.
Does he have any other guesses?
Well, we did look up online what we could find out, and we found also the term booby prize, and that a booby trap or a booby prize goes to someone who is a fool or is an idiot. But that’s about as far as we could go.
So he asked why an idiot or a fool was called a boob or a booby, and I said, I don’t know, but maybe we could find out.
So you’re calling the boobs.
That’s right.
No, no, no, no, not at all.
So just to clarify, a booby trap is something, I guess where you kind of set a trick for somebody that they’re not expecting. A paint is going to fall on them when they open a door, or there’s going to be a hidden rope on the ground that’s going to yank them up into the trees when they step into the rope, that sort of thing, right?
Yeah.
Yeah, so you’re on the right track there. I mean, as far as I know, the idea of a booby trap is something that makes a boob out of you.
Yep, exactly right.
And he just wanted to know why. I mean, obviously that word now has a completely different connotation, but how did someone looking ridiculous was called a boob?
Well, it may come from the Spanish word bobo, which means fool.
Okay.
It’s definitely tied to the kind of, I don’t know if it comes from that, but there’s some reinforcement there from the goofy seabird called the booby. I don’t know if you’ve seen these on the Discovery Channel or any of these.
The blue-footed ones. They’re wobbly, kind of weird-looking birds. You wonder how they stand up at all.
Okay.
Yeah, kind of goofy-looking.
Interesting.
Yeah, so the idea is the idea of goofiness. And booby trap is kind of a weird word because you first see it in the mid-19th century, the idea of schoolboys playing tricks on each other, but it’s also come to mean something much more vicious, to booby trap a house or something in a war situation.
Right.
I have to say that the elephant in the room here, the giant boob in the room here, I guess, is the connection between boobs and breasts, right?
Right.
Right.
And we can just dismiss that because it has nothing to do with the idea of a booby trap.
Okay, and I think that’s where his 12-year-old mentality was going, and I’m glad to know that’s not how it started.
Yeah, that kind of boob is from an entirely different family of words, probably from an old Germanic term that simply means breast.
Okay.
So sometimes in English we have words that look exactly the same, sound exactly the same, but come from entirely different roots. And in this case, those boobies that he’s probably thinking about a lot are not the same as in the booby trap.
Okay.
Well, Karen, I hope we’ve provided a little bit of clarity. That was fun. Thank you for sharing that with us.
Okay.
Thank you for your call.
All right.
Bye-bye.
Bye-bye.
Bye-bye.
If you’ve got a question about words for parts of the body or different ways to entrap your co-host, give us a call, 1-877-929-9673, or send us an email to words@waywordradio.org.
You must. You must. You must give us a call.
