Boo, as in my boo for a sweetheart or other loved one, became especially visible in African-American speech and music in the mid-1990s, including in the song “My Boo” by Ghost Town DJs. The term is definitely older than that, though, and may have circulated in the late 1980s, but its exact origin is uncertain. The likeliest path is a baby-talk reshaping of baby, alongside pet-name forms such as my baby. Other suggestions, including Yiddish bubbe or Sally Brown’s Sweet Baboo in Peanuts, are possible but less likely. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of ““Boo” as a Term of Endearment in African-American Speech”
Hello, you have A Way with Words.
Hello, my name is Tricia.
Hi, Tricia. Welcome. Where are you calling from?
I’m calling from Dallas, Texas today.
All right. Well, how can we help you?
My co-workers are always using the term boo, and I was interested to know where it originated from and how it came to be used as a term of endearment today.
Oh, boo to mean a sweetie. Like you’re my boo.
Exactly.
Okay. And do you use this or no?
I personally do not.
Okay, great.
And now, are your friends who use this term, are they African-American?
Yes, many of my coworkers are.
That really conforms to what we know about the history of boo as a term of endearment. It first pops up really strongly in the mid-90s, although it’s definitely older than that. It starts showing up in popular songs.
Do you remember the song by the Ghost Town DJs about my boo?
No, I don’t know that song.
I’m not even going to sing it. I can’t sing it, but it’s part of the chorus. My boo.
He is singing it.
Something like that. But there were four or five songs that came out in a span of like 18 to 24 months that had My Boo either featured prominently in the lyrics or in the title of the song.
I first learned it in the mid-90s as well from an African-American woman, a friend of mine from Brooklyn. And she used it to refer to her daughter, who she called My Boo. So it’s not just between a man and a woman, or at least it wasn’t at that time. It could just be a pet name for a child.
Right.
And what we think we know about this term is that it probably comes from a kind of baby talk way of referring to your baby. So, my baby, my boo, you know, which is like a kind of gradual corruption of all these little pet names and the ways that you might talk baby talk or say sweet things in an affected voice to someone that you love or someone that you’re sweet on.
Someone else had mentioned maybe that it came from boobala.
Oh, from the Yiddish for, what is it, grandmother?
Yeah.
Or boobie.
Boobie.
Possibly. I also think that some people have thought that maybe it comes from Sally in the Peanuts cartoon by Charles Schultz. She called…
Yeah, I know Sally.
Yeah, she called her sweetie, my sweet baboo.
Yeah.
It’s possible. These are all possibles, but the more likely one is just a slow transformation of the word baby.
Well, and plus it works, right? I mean, it’s such a great term of affection.
Yeah, my boo.
Yeah, my boo.
So we’re coming on probably, it’s probably more than 20 years old at this point. We probably, if we looked really hard, we could find it in the late 1980s in the speech of African Americans, in the songs, in the books, and the other written artifacts of American life.
That’s very interesting. So what song did you say was when we started hearing it?
Well, the biggest hit that had My Boo in it was by the Ghost Town DJs, and it was called My Boo. And I think it was 95 or 96. You can find it on YouTube. It’s a pretty good song, too, Ash, and it’s not a bad song to bust a move to. I mean, it’s a little romantic and a little sweet, but it’s, you know, it’s not really a prom song.
Maybe it is, actually. I don’t know. What do I know about proms at this age?
That’s very interesting. I’ll be happy to share that with everyone.
Yeah, it’s a good one to blast that. You’ll get some people dancing and singing because it was a fairly large, a fairly well-known song at the time.
Yeah, you might want to do it late Friday afternoon.
Yeah, when you’re all thinking about the weekend.
Well, thank you very much.
You’re welcome.
Tricia, thanks for calling.
Bye-bye.
Bye-bye.
Bye-bye.
The discussion of the word “boo” brought to mind “Slippin’ and a Slidin”, a song that was popular in the 1950s.
All of the recordings of this song that I have listened to include the phrase “ain’t gonna be your fool no more.” However, in the version recorded by Little Richard in 1956, the second iteration of this phrase sounds (at least to me) as if the word “fool” has been replaced by “boo.”
When I first heard this song (during the “oldies revival” of the 1970s), I assumed that “boo” was derived from the word “beau.” This bit of amateur etymology is in keeping with the more recent explanation provided by the Urban Dictionary.
Your recent discussion of the origins of the word “boo” brought to mind a song popular in the 1950s called “Slippin’ and a Slidin.”
All of the recordings of this song that I have listened to include the phrase “ain’t gonna be your fool no more.” However, in the version recorded by Little Richard in 1956, the second iteration of this phrase sounds (at least to me) as if the word “fool” has been replaced by “boo.”
When I first heard this song, during the “oldies revival” of the 1970s, I assumed that “boo” was derived from the word “beau.” This bit of amateur etymology is in keeping with the one provided by the Urban Dictionary, which also connects “boo” to “beau.”