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I'm interested in the origin and etymology of this exclamation.
I recently heard Curly say it in a Three Stooges B&W short so I know it dates much earlier than what I've seen in the Wikipedia entries.
Curly's usage in the short matched my current understanding as "An exclamation of joy, excitement or triumph."
Curly would have been in productions from 1934 to 1946 so that sets an approximate date range.
I'm trying to find the specific short but haven't been successful yet.
The first time I ever heard it was from Stuart Scott on ESPN Sports Center in the 90s (I think). You can read more discussion here.
I tried to do an Ngram but the problem is that "booya" is a proper name, a type of boat, and a soup. Couldn't find it used as an exclamation in any of the older books cited. There's probably a few uses in the more recent books, but I was looking for first use.
Of late, it appears to have entered the hip-hop vocabulary as an "in your face" exclamation.
Made-up exclamations like "booya" are notoriously difficult to track down.
It seems that booyah is the word for mouth in the language of "Fernando Po". I wasn't willing to wade through the book, for lack of oomph. but I suspect it's a dialog of Tagalog or Filipino.
Here's he book I found it in, A Voyage round the world, including travels in Africa, Asia, Australasia ... By James Holman
It seem to be an 1834 book, and the modern use of booyah seems to be sorta "You said it!" I jhave the impression that the term is popular among one branch of the armed forces, I think perhaps the Marines (but could very easaily have that wrong), but not among others, so finding this result in a Fernandinian-English dictionary really surprised me.
This is the ngrams search I used.
An example of serendipity! Word coined by Horace Walpole, who wrote a fairy tale cal;led "The three princes of Serendip" The three were lucky in making desirable discoveries by chance..
Thanks for the ngram example.
I need to study in detail the ngram viewer and learn the differences between the corpora. Some of the usages I encountered are probably not represented in the various corpora unless they somehow include TV or movie scripts. I have only a vague familiarity with the ngram viewer at this time.
Martha Barnette
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