CHAT: "boocoo"

Christophe Grandsire scripsit:

> Not surprising to me since it happens in very informal (and somewhat
> childish-sounding) French as well. I think it comes from anticipation of
> the second vowel.
Very likely.

> Still, the presence of this word in English is surprising to me :)) . I've
> never heard it before...
I think of it as 1960s-era slang: I don't use it myself, but my wife (15
years older) does.  My guess would be that it came into the language from
Vietnamese pidgin.  OTOH, m-w.com labels it "mostly Southern U.S.", and
she is a Southerner; this may represent influence from Louisiana French.
On the gripping hand, there were and are a lot more Southerners in the
army, for reasons ranging from family tradition to economic hard times.

Googling shows that "boocoo bucks" is a particularly common collocation.
And then there's "wooly boocoo shay avay mwah!"  (I swear I am not
making this up: see www.x10.com/news/news/0925_song.htm)

One of the two compression schemes for Unicode is called BOCU-1 (no
coincidence).

--
John Cowan  jcowan@reutershealth.com  www.ccil.org/~cowan  www.reutershealth.com
"In computer science, we stand on each other's feet."
        --Brian K. Reid

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