James Kilpatrick explains how the word bootylicious (‘sexually attractive, sexy; shapely’), apparently new to him despite its ubiquity over the last decade, entered the OED, a canonization that filled him with horror (“I asked, ‘The booty-what?’ I cried, ‘C’mon, Don!’ I said, quietly, ‘Aaargh!'”). He draws a veil over the dirty bits (“does not qualify for quotation in a family newspaper”), but Nicole provides the full Monty at her excellent copy-editing blog A Capital Idea.
My favorite of the OED citations:
2001 Sunday Herald (Glasgow) 20 Dec. (Mag.) 29 (caption) It’s Hogmanay, time to party and look bootylicious for the Bells.
If I remember correctly, bootylicious first came out with one of Destiny’s Child’s songs. As for booty, when I hear the word nowadays, even referring to what pirates were after, I have to train myself to go back to that original meaning. The shake-your-booty connotation sure seems like the more common one out there, so to speak.
Something so obvious. The origin of bootylicious must be the name of a popular bubble gum Bubble-licious.
Bootylicious started way before Destiny’s child claimed it as thier own. I’m nto exactly sure when it started but a band named Zebrahead had a track called Bootylicious Vinyl released on an album in 1998.
Bootylicious goes back at least as far as the early ’90s, when Snoop used it in a line on The Chronic: “the rhymes you were kickin/ were quite bootylicious.” Damn it felt good to be a suburban teen gangsta…
languagehat: “James Kilpatrick … draws a veil over the dirty bits”
To my shock, so does the OED: the quotation currently appears as
I’m further disappointed that the OED has not bothered to be consistent in its citations: the same song is quoted under chronic, slang sense ‘high-grade or particularly potent marijuana’, as
(They may be right to cite different authors; Snoop Dogg rapped the “bootylicious” line, but I don’t know about other parts of the song. But they should at least be consistent with the title, and why use a secondary source for one entry and not another?)
Toby: “The origin of bootylicious must be the name of a popular bubble gum Bubble-licious.”
Nope, “-licious” as a suffix goes back to the 19th century, appearing mainly in advertising for most of the 20th century until making the jump to slang in the early 1990s. Ben Zimmer traced its history on Language Log (his antedates were, in due course, incorporated into the OED).
To my shock, so does the OED
Good lord. What’s going on over there? They’re running in six different directions at once!
The meaning of “them rhymes were quite bootylicious” has been much debated. The OED breaks it out as a separate sense, “Of rap lyrics: bad, weak. rare.”, but without quoting enough of the context to support that definition, or any explanation of how “-licious” could be negative. Nicole’s blog (still online, yay) did quote the preceding line to show that it’s an insult: “Your bark was loud, but your bite wasn’t vicious.” But was that really ever an established sense? The OED gives only one other citation, and it’s obviously just quoting the song:
Volokh commenters guessed that the original song was sarcastic in some way, or else it meant “your rhymes are like ass” and the “-licious” didn’t mean anything and was just there to rhyme, or else it was sexist, i.e. “you rhyme like a girl.”
Fortunately, Dave Wilton has a Big List entry from 2024 that improves on the OED. He has two independent citations for the “bad lyrics” sense, an antedate from 1991 and another one from 1994, plus an antedating of the more familiar “curvaceous, sexy” sense to 1993. His interpretation: the insulting use is “a sexist metaphor of women being poor songwriters” and “is evidence that bootylicious was already established in oral use in the sexually attractive sense”.
*I can’t hold back from raging about the OED’s silent Briticization of quotation marks in American sources. Google Groups has the original, and it reads:
Why do they do this? They don’t change spellings, they don’t change capitalization (except at the beginning of the quote), so why do they waste their time screwing with the source’s punctuation?
Come on. Efil4zaggin isn’t that bad even if it was a comedown from its predecessor. It’s been more than 33 years. Can’t we live and let live?
Huh. If anything I’d have thought it was the other way around: a journal that did this to me, turning my quotes of others into misleading misquotes, was headquartered in the US, while another I’ve published in has extremely detailed instructions to authors that insist on logical placement of quotation marks and parentheses and is based in the UK…
As to “why”, the Viennese Universal Explanation applies: [ʋɶsˈd̥ɛpːɐd̥͡sãn] “cuz they’re dumb”.
they should at least be consistent with the title, and why use a secondary source for one entry and not another
The inconsistent title is because of the inconsistent source; the album printed text uses the censored title, whereas the volume of lyrics I presume uses the uncensored one.
As to why the source is inconsistent: did the OED change its policy from requiring a written source to allowing audio sources? If so, maybe the “bootylicious” entry was revised after that change and the “chronic” entry before?
the Viennese Universal Explanation applies: [ʋɶsˈd̥ɛpːɐd̥͡sãn] “cuz they’re dumb”.
“Weil sie deppert sind” ?
Viennese is not much harder to understand than Heptapod. You merely have to listen with close sympathetic attention, and use a frequency analyzer.
Exactly.
the album printed text uses the censored title
Ah, thanks, that would explain it. Good to know it wasn’t *their* censorship, although it leaves the question of what source they used for the lyrics (did the album have a lyric sheet?), as well as the philosophical question of whether the title “is” what’s printed on the cover or what’s in the copyright registration — typing the line into google today gets the uncensored lyrics and title with copyright notice, but that wasn’t possible in 2004. I shouldn’t judge 2004 work by today’s standards, but I still think they should try harder to be consistent when citing the same work in different entries.
(The bootylicious entry is from 2004; chronic (slang sense) is from 2007; but another line is cited as from “——wit Dre Day” under ace meaning ‘best friend’ from 2011. So it isn’t a change from one policy to another, it’s just inconsistent.)
did the OED change its policy from requiring a written source to allowing audio sources?
Yes, years ago, but they still don’t have many of then. There was a wonderful blog post (which seems to have been discarded from the web site, or at least Google can’t find it) about evidence they’d found in recordings of old radio shows, such as this quote for the Liverpool regionalism “made up” meaning “Surprised and delighted; very pleased, thrilled”:
They do still have a blog post about words coined in film, which describes citations from unscripted dialogue:
Other examples: some of the citations for beam in the Star Trek sense are “transcribed from TV programme”, others are from scripts. And there’s a citation under half for “not half the man I used to be” from “J. Lennon & P. McCartney, Yesterday (transcribed from song, perf. ‘The Beatles’) in Help (album)”.