Re: CHAT: "boocoo"

I've heard english people here in Nottingham use beaucoup occasionally
but with an awareness that it is french... it isn't really treated like
a native word. I suspect that people who use it here are remembering
"Only Fools and Horses"... a comedy that used to be on British TV about
two brothers called del and rodney, and del had a habit of using badly
pronounced or incorrect french in his conversations. It was supposed to
be funny in fact, because it was so bad even people who didn't speak
french would know it was wrong... like he consistently used "au revoir"
to mean "hello".

>Christophe Grandsire scripsit:
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>>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.
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>Very likely.
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>>Still, the presence of this word in English is surprising to me :)) . I've
>>never heard it before...
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>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.
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>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)
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>One of the two compression schemes for Unicode is called BOCU-1 (no
>coincidence).
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>--
>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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