Query: Jim Cramer's "Booyah!"

[Fred Shapiro]

On Thu, 8 Dec 2005, Benjamin Zimmer wrote:

> '90s (and continues to do so, tiresomely, to this day). So that would
> have been well after the original popularization of the interjection
> in hiphop circles by the Samoan rap group Boo-Yaa T.R.I.B.E. circa
> 1990. All Music Guide says the name derives from "a slang term for
> discharging a shotgun":

The following pushes the evidence back to the 1980s, and perhaps indicates
that it predates the T.R.I.B.E.:

1989 _U.S. News & World Report_ 10 Apr. [article beginning on page 20]
(Nexis)  Los Angeles. Drug dealing and high-tech weaponry have escalated
the warfare between the city's long-established loosely knit gangs, the
Crips and the Bloods. A favorite expression for killing someone these days
is "boo-yah" -- the sound from a sawed-off shotgun.

Fred Shapiro


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