Query: Jim Cramer's "Booyah!"

[Jonathan Lighter]

SWAG :

  The strongly stressed "boo ! " represents the sound of the shot itself (cf. _boom_!), while the "yah !" represents the sound of a ricochet, as presented in approximately one zillion westerns and war movies.

  Alternatively, the "yah !" is an echo of the shot.

  Like I said, a SWAG.

  JL

Wilson Gray <hwgray at GMAIL.COM> wrote:
  ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
Sender: American Dialect Society
Poster: Wilson Gray
Subject: Re: Query: Jim Cramer's "Booyah!"
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On 12/8/05, Benjamin Zimmer wrote:
>
> ---------------------- Information from the mail header
> -----------------------
> Sender: American Dialect Society
> Poster: Benjamin Zimmer
> Subject: Re: Query: Jim Cramer's "Booyah!"
>
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------=
------
>
> On 12/8/05, Fred Shapiro wrote:
> > On Thu, 8 Dec 2005, Cohen, Gerald Leonard wrote:
> >
> > > Would anyone know the origin of Cramer's "Booyah"? Is he the only
> > > one who uses this interjection (besides the people who have picked it
> up
> > > from him)? Did he perhaps just invent the term himself?
> >
> > When I read this message my first reaction was that Stuart Scott's life
> > has been in vain. Then I did a little Nexis research, which seems to
> > suggest that the term has its origins as an inner-city exclamation
> > showing up by 1991. You ought to get around a little bit more, Jerry.
>
> I think Scott started using it on SportsCenter in the mid- to late
> '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":
>
> http://www.allmusic.com/cg/amg.dll?p=3Damg&sql=3D11:lxfibkj96akz~T1
>
> Cassell's agrees:
>
> booya! booyah! [1980s] 1. (US Campus) a term used to
> indicate suddenness or surprise 2. (US Black gang)
> an echoic term used to imitate the sound of a
> shotgun being fired (cf Booyaka!) (From Standard
> English exclamation boo! + yah).
>
>
> --Ben Zimmer
>

In my youth - the late '50's - in Los Angeles, dye-yaow [daiyaw] was an
echoic term used to imitate the sound of a handgun being fired and was used
as slang term meaning "exceptionally good(-looking)." (From Standard Englis=
h
exclamation dye! + yaow).

-Wilson




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