What about when people or an audience say boo to condemn a performance, person, or action? While jeering and heckling can be found in accounts of ancient Greek plays, the term boo for the action doesn’t appear until at least 1825 in a theater book called The London Stage. The phantom boo appears as early as 1738 in a book by Gilbert Crokatt called Scotch Presbyterian Eloquence Display’d, which defined it as “a word that’s used in the north of Scotland to frighten crying children.” The 1808 Etymological Dictionary of the Scottish Language suggests boo is connected to the mythical Bu-Man, a word apparently related to bogeyman. ![]() Latin and Greek also have verbs, as it happens, that also use the boo sound for “shouting” or “crying.” Boo is familiar to many as Boo!, that noise ghosts and monsters are said to make when they pop out and scare somebody, probably ultimately based on the attention-getting sound of the syllable boo.
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