Beau=girlfriend

[Wilson Gray]

I agree with the UD that "boo" is unisex. However, I consider it to be
sadly unfortunate that people have re-analyzed an
essentially-unanalyzable slang word as being derived from a word from
a foreign language that has grammatical gender and hypercorrecting the
slang term to match the foreign word without taking into consideration
the fact of grammatical gender.

In my high-school years, I was a member of a clique rather grandiosely
named "The Beaux." Our female counterparts were termed, somewhat
clumsily, "The Beauettes." We were well aware of the existence of
"belle," but "The Belles" wouldn't have made clear to the uneducated
masses that the girls "belonged" - uh, I'm talking early 'Fifties,
here - to The Beaux.

And yes, I do know that slang terms in English can have etymons that
are clearly from foreign languages, e.g.

booCOO "a lot, much, many" < French _beaucoup_

COMrad "a German, the German people" (BE military slang) < German _Kamerad_

doob "a German" (Army Security Agency Russian-"linguist" slang,
assumed to be) < Russian slang _dub_ [dup] "blockhead," literally
"oak"

-Wilson

-Wilson

On Sun, Sep 7, 2008 at 12:44 PM, Gordon, Matthew J.
<GordonMJ at missouri.edu> wrote:
> ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       "Gordon, Matthew J." <GordonMJ at MISSOURI.EDU>
> Subject:      Re: Beau=girlfriend
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Perhaps influenced by "boo" which I thought was primarily used for =
> women, but some UrbanDictionarios allow for men too. Indeed one entry =
> states that 'boo' derives from 'beau' which sounds reasonable.
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: American Dialect Society on behalf of Leslie Decker
> Sent: Sun 9/7/2008 11:22 AM
> To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
> Subject:      Beau=3Dgirlfriend
> =20
> I sheepishly admit to occasionally reading the gossip columns from WENN
> news on the Internet Movie Database (imdb.com) website...  Recently I
> have noticed that they have started using the word 'beau' to describe
> someone's GIRLfriend, as in:
>
>    Hollywood actor Morgan Freeman <http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000151/>
>    has found love again, just one month after he announced he was
>    divorcing his wife of 24 years.
>
>    The first image of The Dark Knight
>    <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0468569/> star and his reported new
>    /*beau, Mary Joyce Hays*/, surfaced in the media this week
>    (ends05Sep08), showing Freeman hugging the blonde divorcee and
>    smiling widely.
>
> http://www.imdb.com/news/ni0562131/
>
> I have always thought of the word 'beau' as a rather outdated word for
> boyfriend--it is a masculine form after all.  After seeing this blurb,
> which is the second time I noticed it on this website, I went looking
> (for about 5 minutes) for other examples of the word being used in this
> way.  I DID find this entry from the Urban Dictionary:
> http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=3Dbeau which seems to =
> imply
> that more people think beau is acceptable for girlfriend.
>
> What do you think?
>
> Leslie
>
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