In the wild: boujie

Shapiro, Fred fred.shapiro at YALE.EDU
Tue Jan 25 12:14:25 UTC 2011


And it's in OED, under the logical spelling "bourgie," with citations back to 1967.  With this spelling there are 151,000 Google hits.  It's not part of my own vocabulary, but I have heard it fairly often for many years, perhaps mostly in films.

Fred



________________________________________
From: American Dialect Society [ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU] On Behalf Of Jesse Sheidlower [jester at PANIX.COM]
Sent: Tuesday, January 25, 2011 6:11 AM
To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
Subject: Re: In the wild: boujie

HDAS does have this, under the heading "_boojie_ or _boojy_",
with a first quotation from the 1970 edition of Major's
dictionary.

Jesse Sheidlower
OED

On Tue, Jan 25, 2011 at 12:07:41AM -0500, George Thompson wrote:
> > My immediate assumption was that this was some colloquial version of "bourgeois".
>
> Correctly, too.
>
> The indispensable HDAS seems not to have this, (while remaining indispensable); Green's Dictionary of Slang has citations going back to the mid 1970s; it was discussed here, to no benefit, in 2002.
> I haven't checked OED.
>
> GAT
>
> George A. Thompson
> Author of A Documentary History of "The African Theatre", Northwestern Univ. Pr., 1998, but nothing much lately.
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: Victor Steinbok <aardvark66 at GMAIL.COM>
> Date: Monday, January 24, 2011 10:35 pm
> Subject: In the wild: boujie
> To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
>
> > Heard on Unique Eats program, in reference to a hamburger with poached
> > pears:
> >
> > "It's a little boujie, but..."
> >
> > My immediate assumption was that this was some colloquial version of
> > "bourgeois". And Google showed a healthy representation (24.5K raw). UD
> > has it going back to 2003 (bouji), but the definitions leave a lot to
> > be
> > desired. Most suggest that it is some kind of slurred/mumbled version
> > of
> > "bullshit" (a la Animal House, I suppose). But the latest entry (2010)
> > seems to be almost exactly on the money:
> >
> > > A Southern African-American contraction of the word "bourgeoisie",
> > > used to describe someone rich or in the upper class. Similar meaning
> > > to "sidity".
> >
> > The only issue is that the speaker in the program was a female
> > Asian-American chef (I missed the name--[Lee] Anne Wong?) and definitely
> > not Southern. (If it is Anne Wong, perhaps she picked it up at FIT...)
> >
> > OT item of interest: "Cold Stone Creamery is dessert pornography."
> > Interesting that "porn" is not shortened.
> >
> >      VS-)
> >
> > ------------------------------------------------------------
> > The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org



More information about the Ads-l mailing list