"Beck Dissects Huckabee's Curious, Mysterious 'Bo" oger Bears' | The Blaze

[Wilson Gray]

On Mon, Apr 25, 2011 at 9:49 PM, Ben Zimmer
<bgzimmer at babel.ling.upenn.edu> wrote:
> OED has (US regional) "booger" meaning 'a menacing supernatural
> creature; a goblin, bogy, or ghost' from 1827, and "boogerman" (same)
> from 1847.
>

When I was a child, ca. a century later, _boogerman_ was the term of
choice for the meaning cited above.. When I was a schoolchild, I was
introduced to _boogerbear_ as one of a zillion words with the meaning,
"unattractive girl or woman."

AFAIK, any resemblance between these two words or between these two
words and _booger_ "clotted snot; the nickname of a character in the
_Nerd_ movies" is purely coincidental.

_Booger_ can be used - in BE, at least - as a kind of pswaydo-pronoun,
as in a sentence that I once heard:

"Damn, man! You're a *big* _booger_!"

--
-Wilson
-----
All say, "How hard it is that we have to die!"---a strange complaint
to come from the mouths of people who have had to live.
-Mark Twain

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