Lucas Reilly at Mental Floss asks Why Do Ghosts Say “Boo”?:
People have screamed “boo,” or at least some version of it, to startle others since the mid-16th century. (One of the earliest examples documented by the Oxford English Dictionary appeared in that 1560s poetic thriller, Smyth Whych that Forged Hym a New Dame.) But ghosts? They’ve only been using the word boo for less than two centuries.
The etymology of boo is uncertain. The OED compares it with the Latin boare or the Greek βοᾶν, meaning to “cry aloud, roar, [or] shout.” Older dictionaries suggest it could be an onomatopoeia mimicking the lowing of a cow.
Whatever its origins, the word had a slightly different shade of meaning a few hundred years ago: Boo (or, in the olden days, bo or bu) was not used to frighten others but to assert your presence. Take the traditional Scottish proverb “He can’t say bo to a goose,” which for centuries has been a slick way to call somebody “timid” or “sheepish.” Or consider the 1565 story Smyth Whych that Forged Hym a New Dame, in which an overconfident blacksmith tries to hammer a woman back into her youth, and the main character demands of his dying experiment: “Speke now, let me se / and say ones bo!” […]
But boo became scarier with time. After all, as the OED notes, the word is phonetically suited “to produce a loud and startling sound.” And by 1738, Gilbert Crokatt was writing in Presbyterian Eloquence Display’d that “Boo is a Word that’s used in the North of Scotland to frighten crying children.”
In 18th century Scotland, bo, boo, and bu would latch onto plenty of words describing things that went bump in the night. According to the Dictionary of the Scots Language, the term bu-kow applied to hobgoblins and “anything frightful,” such as scarecrows. The word bogey, for “evil one,” would evolve into bogeyman. And there’s bu-man, or boo-man, a terrifying goblin that haunted man […] It was only a matter of time until ghosts got lumped into this creepy “muckle boo-man” crowd.
Which is too bad. Before the early 1800s, ghosts were believed to be eloquent, sometimes charming, and very often literary speakers. The spirits that appeared in the works of the Greek playwrights Euripides and Seneca held the important job of reciting the play’s prologue. The apparitions in Shakespeare’s plays conversed in the same swaying iambic pentameter as the living. But by the mid-1800s, more literary ghosts apparently lost interest in speaking in complete sentences. Take this articulate exchange with a specter from an 1863 Punch and Judy script:
Ghost: Boo-o-o-oh!
Punch: A-a-a-ah!
Ghost: Boo-o-o-o-oh!
Punch: Oh dear ! oh dear ! It wants’t me!
Ghost: Boo-o-o-o-oh!
He goes on to talk about the influence of spiritualism and traditions carried overseas by Celtic immigrants: “Scotland was a great exporter of people in the middle of the 1800s, and perhaps it’s thanks to the Scots-Irish diaspora that boo became every ghost’s go-to greeting.” For clickbait, it’s surprisingly informative! And A treatyse of the smyth whych that forged hym a new dame is available here, if you want the whole story; the “which that” in the title is striking.
By the way, if anyone’s interested in Media Cultures of the Russian 1990s: Inventing the Post-Soviet Public Sphere, edited by Maya Vinokour, it’s available for free download from Amherst College Press.
True to its Scottish roots, my Chambers Twentieth Century (1970s, more specifically), has the goose expression sv “bo” rather than “boo”. It also has sv skulduggery “see skulduddery”.
AHD and MW online don’t seem to have “boo to a goose” specifically, but have a [nonassertive say] “boo” as “[say] anything”, which looks like a new-to-me development .
Hmph. I‘ve never heard a ghost say “Boo!”
No, but don’t you wish you had?
You are J. M. W. Turner and I claim my five pounds.
J. McN. Whistler said something similar to what Brett said.
I had no idea that saying boo to geese was supposed to be a Scottish habit – I think of a goose as quite an English creature. (Possibly because of Mr Forgetful.)
Woops! For confusing Turner and Whistler, I not only don’t get my five pounds, I have to put a shilling into the Dead Artists’ Reanimation Fund.
Blame Arthur Machen.
(I can’t find a source for either attribution, other than some “AI” garbage referencing a Facebook post. My searches just produced pages of ads. Google enshittification proceeds ever onward.)
[june]
i have a bu-kow
a new kow
a true kow
named karoline
[kow]
boo, boo – boo, boo!
> the works of the Greek playwrights Euripides and Seneca
Really confused me for a moment. Do you think they meant Sophocles?
der was?
(Common, if heavily deprecated, in areas with Bavarian dialects.)
Denasalizing cows now?
“could be an onomatopoeia mimicking the lowing of a cow”
I believe that would be a different boo. As in the sound one makes at the opera when the performance is not up to snuff. Possibly from the Italian “bue”?
I‘ve never heard a ghost say “Boo!”
What does the Holy Ghost say? Or does it more sort of breath on you/flow through you? נִשְׁמַת־ר֨וּחַ חַיִּ֜ים
Never “Boo” in my experience. But further research is needed.
(Various soi-disant Christians whom one might name seem to me to be excellent candidates for getting a good jump scare from the Holy Spirit.)
Do you think they meant Sophocles?
Or just thought Seneca was Greek.
I was all set to say that I couldn’t think of any Euripides play with a prologue spoken by a ghost, but actually I can (Hecuba.)
Nothing would surprise me about the ghastly Seneca. Prologues spoken by ghosts would be just his thing. Preferably dripping blood or horribly mutilated.
TIL that Seneca wrote plays (or if I’d known this at one point I forgot)!
Sophocles is cited in Perseus for using βοάω: https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus:abo:tlg,0011,001:772&lang=original
which I checked before making my comment… but re-reading the original quoted sentence I realize that’s totally beside the point. I got two trains of thought mixed up, I guess.
(briefly checking now, I see that both Sophocles and Seneca wrote plays that have ghosts in speaking roles but I’m not sure if any of those ghosts do the prologues)
The ghost of Tantalus opens Thyestes, but it really isn’t a prologue in the way Polydorus in Hecuba is, is it?
I once copyedited a (very good) book on the Octavia, which “was attributed to Seneca, but modern scholarship generally discredits this, since it contains accurate prophecies of both his and Nero’s deaths.”
I can’t find a source for either attribution
The Quote Investigator has investigated the quote and ‘believes that James McNeill Whistler did trump Oscar Wilde with a witticism. The exact phrasing of Whistler’s remark is uncertain, but the semantics accords with “You will, Oscar, you will.”’
One Stephen Goranson provided the earliest citations.
That’s not the anecdote in question, though. A society-lady visitor is supposed to have complained to Turner (or whoever) that she had never seen a sunset like the one in his paintng, and he is supposed to have said “Yes, but don’t you wish you had?”
We were reminded of this by the Arthur Machen interview FJ linked to here:
https://languagehat.com/dance-of-mahanaim/#comment-4676455
I had heard it before somewhere, though, I think again attributed to Turner. It does have the faintly suspicious air of a thing that one can imagine someone thinking Turner ought to have said, though.
And there’s bu-man, or boo-man, a terrifying goblin that haunted man
German has Buhmann, which my online dictionary translates as “scapegoat”. It can be used that way, but it’s rather “terrifying figure made up to frighten little children”. Now I wonder how old the use of Buh to frighten or startle people is in German, and whether the English and German usages influenced each other.
@DE: Then I owe a shilling to Hat and one to this zombie thing.
@hans
https://etymologiebank.nl/trefwoord/boeman
Boeman is attested mid 1800s. If you accept it is derived ultimately from boesman, and that boe+man is folk etymology, that word is attested in 1573. Re boesman, one of the dictionaries cited at the link has
“De 16e-eeuwse vormen wijzen erop dat het eerste lid de stam van het werkwoord boezen ‘stommelen; lawaai maken; kloppen’ [1599; Kil.] is, van onduidelijke verdere herkomst”
i.e., the 16C forms imply that the first element is the stem of the verb boezen (“walk noisily[stommelen, compare English stamp/stomp]”, “make a racket”, “knock” [reminds me of It. bussare]); the further origin of boezen is unclear.
Another dictionary at the link connects boezen with “to bite”. I thought of Russian bes, but no one seems to have suggested any connection, and if the original final consonant is ts and not s, I don’t think there could be one.
The kid’s already crying! Why frighten them even more?!
I was certainly familiar with the apocryphal Turner quote, but it never would have come to mind if I hadn’t just heard that radio essay by Machen, in which he mentioned it.
Same here.
AFAIK, Turner had witnessed numerous sunsets like that in the Year Without a Summer (1816) after Mt. Tambora went up.
Because some children react to being scared by freezing.
The others will continue to be beaten until morale improves.
Bogeyman.
Also Norw. busemann, from buse v. “move or act quickly and without regard for anything”.
I’m not able to quickly find the prior thread on which I think the toponym or expression came up, but greetings to all from What Cheer, Iowa. Possibly a kindlier greeting than “Boo”?
“What cheer?” was discussed here; What Cheer, Iowa, came up here (where Allan from Iowa said “An Iowa newspaper columnist proposed that the demonym for residents of What Cheer should be What Cheerleaders”).
.
As yet further evidence for Proto-World: Laura McPherson’s grammar of the Dogon language Tommo So tells us that the ideophone bùúⁿ expresses the sound of “a long, melodious fart.”
I am sure that we can agree that such a sound might well be quite startling. Whether it could be produced by a ghost is a question requiring further research.
There’s “boo!”, the startling/scaring sound; “boo!” the sound of disapproval; “boo”, the archaic greeting; “boo”, how the Scots coo goes; “boo-boo”, a minor injury; “boo-hoo”, the sound of weeping; “buh?”, the sound of confusion . . .
Wikipedia Boo is a disambiguation page for the many places. people, and things called or nicknamed Boo. Huh, there’s a
.bootop level domain. Maybe a languagehat.boo domain could redirect to the main site?Of linguistic interest:
• Boo dialect, of the Teke-Ebo or Central Teke language, spoken in Congo and the Democratic Republic of the Congo
• Boko language (Benin), also called Boo language
• Bomu language, also called Boo, or Western Bobo Wule language
• Bozo language, ISO 639 code boo, spoken in Mali
“Bo!“, in Hebrew, would mean “Come!” (imperative)
(Also:
boustro
nodehp)
Gabriel Manessy hisownself wrote a monograph about noun morphology in Bwamu/Bobo-Oule. I am the proud owner of a copy. (It’s not very good, unfortunately.)
Manessy classified it as being closer to Oti-Volta than the Grusi languages are. It’s, um, not. In reality, it’s one of the languages bordering on the western edges of yer Actual Gur, like Tiefo and Kulango, which probably aren’t even part of the same genetic branch of Volta-Congo as Real Gur.
For all that Manessy was the granddaddy of Trying to Do Proper Historical Comparative Work in Gur, he was really bad at subclassification. He seems to have worked on a sort of covert Mass Comparison eyeballing-the-data principle.
His classification of Buli/Konni as the most aberrant branch of Oti-Volta is still in the standard references. Buli/Konni is in reality the closest relative of Western Oti-Volta, so that’s like making Dutch the first branch of Indo-European.
Boko, on the other hand, is Mande, and a very close relative of Bisa, the language of the immediate northern neighbours of the Kusaasi.
Bozo is Mande too, but only a distant relation. I think Jeffrey Heath wrote a grammar of it.
Ah, yes he did:
https://zenodo.org/records/7127001/files/Cliffs%20Jenaama%20Bozo%20grammar.pdf
There’s more than one Bozo language. I knew that. Honest.
Lameen brought up the Bozo word for “manatee” here.
I remember reading, somewhere, at some time in the past, a story without any citations. It described a tribe living somewhere in the vicinity of Old Prussia, that mysterious land where pagans spoke a now-forgotten language, back around 200 AD or so. These people worshipped a god named Bo, who commanded them to kill any strangers they came across as a sacrifice. They would lurk in hiding, waiting for unwary travellers to come along, then spring out and attack them, shouting the name of their god, “Bo!”, “Bo!”.
Such terror did they cause to the neighbouring peoples that the cry “Bo!” has ever since struck fear into the hearts of travellers in those parts, and, over the centuries, the tale has spread throughout Northern Europe and beyond. Hence our current concept of scary ghosts yelling out “Boo!” before dragging their victims into perdition.
These murderous people must not have been very efficient killers, if enough people escaped to pass on the tale of the “Bo!”-shouters.
Sorry, I cannot recollect my source for this not very believable tale. I thought it might have been Brewer’s Dictionary, but it’s not.
Literally all we know about the vicinity of Old Prussia around 200 AD (a bit earlier actually) is in the Germania of Tacitus. Well, there must be some archeology, but.
I just found this in the OED s.v. bo ‘Representing an inarticulate spoken sound or exclamation, esp. one made abruptly in order to surprise or frighten’:
An odd expression. (DSL)
“Blanket here in sense of banner” is perhaps an important piece of non-obvious-to-outsiders context.
It sure is — I missed that entirely. Not so odd now!
I think we’re all Bozos on this site.
I went to see the Blue Blanket on Doors Open Day.
@maidhc: Now we know why the Latin name of Prussia is Borussia.
Proper scary ghosts go “Woooo”, anyway.
“Legend has it that the blanket was presented to the craftsmen of Edinburgh by King James III in 1482 after they rescued him from Edinburgh Castle, where he’d been imprisoned for 9 months”
My King was imprisoned for 9 months and all I got was this stupid blanket.