By the time I got to New Orleans, in 1964, "Boo" was a common term of address, right up there with "Honey" and "Sweety" in white middle class culture. As in "Where y'at, Boo."
techne said
By the time I got to New Orleans, in 1964, "Boo" was a common term of address, right up there with "Honey" and "Sweety" in white middle class culture. As in "Where y'at, Boo."
I'll agree that it was around a lot earlier than the late 1980s.
Yogi Bear had a bromance going with "Boo Boo" when he first appeared in Hanna-Barbera's Huckleberry Hound show in 1958.
Random House says that "boo-boo" originated in the 1950-1955 era. It originally meant an injury of shock, perhaps slight pain, suffered by your dopplic kid, used to sympathize with the child and ease his pain.
I suspect that it may have come from Bibbidi Bobbidi Boo which charted in 1948, but as the song business had strong Jewish influences, Bubbe may be behind it somewhere.
In Yiddish, I think "bubbe" means "grandmother" while it's "bubbuleh" that means "dear."
I taught in a predominantly African-American university setting starting in 1980, and I became curious (but never quite had the nerve to ask) why female staffers (more administrative staff than faculty) would call each other "boo-boo" or "boo." It seemed to be a very distinctively black and female usage. I may have heard it more in the 1990s than in the previous decade, but I couldn't swear to that.
From To Kill a Mockingbird, there is the character Boo Radley, which being an older use of Boo, more likely is a variant on Beau.
I wonder if Captain, May I may have a prison background where the officer in charge of a prison work gang was addressed as cap'n.
