[Ads-l] Boogaloo

Tue Jun 2 17:48:03 UTC 2020

Thanks for your thoughtful comment, Arnold.

The movie "Breakin' 2: Electric Boogaloo" is discussed in the NPR
article which Ben Zimmer pointed to with his first link, so I assumed
that readers understood the connection; however, I should have been
more helpful and mentioned the movie in my post.

The 1994 Usenet post also contained the phrase "The Civil War II --
This Time, It's Personal". This phrase was also built on a movie
reference. The 1987 movie "Jaws: The Revenge" used the tagline "This
time... It's personal".

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0093300/taglines

On Tue, Jun 2, 2020 at 1:02 PM Arnold M. Zwicky <zwicky at stanford.edu> wrote:
>
> > On Jun 2, 2020, at 9:04 AM, ADSGarson O'Toole <adsgarsonotoole at GMAIL.COM> wrote:
> >
> > The phrase "Civil War II - Electric Boogaloo" appeared in a Usenet
> > message in October 1994. The phrase referred to the possibility of a
> > second U.S. Civil War. Read the message to see the context. It looks
> > like the person who used it was "MA Hovi".
> >
> > Usenet distributed message system
> > Newsgroups: alt.tv.melrose-place
> > From: ig... at ellis.uchicago.edu (Sleepy)
> > Subject: Re: U.S. CIVIL WAR IMMINENT
> > Date: Thu, 27 Oct 1994 06:03:47 GMT ...
>
> I'm no longer able to keep up with exchanges on ADS-L, so this is no dount something already posted about (possibly by Ben Zimmer), but "Electric Boogaloo" started as te name of a funk-oriented dance style, celebrated in 1the 1984 movie Breakin' 2: Electric Bougaloo, featuring the celebratory "Electric Boogaloo" pop song by duo Ollie & Jerry. The history of the term after that is extraordinarily complex. And I trust someone has looked into where "boogaloo" came from.
>
> But this is probably all old stuff. I'm posting this just in case it isn't already in the ADS-L record. This would probably be a good time for me to go silent on ADS-L, in any case.
>
> arnold
>
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