[Ads-l] Boogaloo

Ben Zimmer bgzimmer at GMAIL.COM
Tue Jun 2 21:12:59 UTC 2020


In a more innocent time, I wrote about the use of  "___ 2: Electric
Boogaloo" as a snowclone, or phrasal template.

https://blog.oup.com/2007/08/patterns/

Nancy Friedman cited this in her examination of "boogaloo" in February.

https://nancyfriedman.typepad.com/away_with_words/2020/02/word-of-the-week-boogaloo.html


On Tue, Jun 2, 2020 at 1:48 PM ADSGarson O'Toole <adsgarsonotoole at gmail.com>
wrote:

> 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.
> >
>

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