An Etymology Of Slang

On Friday, my students taught me a new word and I taught them a new word. Turns out they were basically the same word.

During my lunch-block class, I overheard a few of my students "frying" a girl about the neighborhood she lives in. They kept telling her, "Your neighborhood is so boozhy (boozh'ee)," a description that seemed to make her fairly uncomfortable. I'd never heard this boozhy term before, but this is a young lady whose father is a heart surgeon and who rarely wears the same outfit twice, so it's probably safe to assume she lives in a "nice" neighborhood, while the kids teasing her had just been describing a block party in their neighborhood where all the adults had simply tuned their car radios to the same station and hung out on the sidewalk. (By the way, the kids were working on an assignment throughout the discussion-- this generation can multitask like nobody's business.) Anyway, my powers of deduction being what they are, I figured I had a pretty good handle on "boozhy" based on context clues, but I was curious about the word, so I asked the kids.

Me: What's boozhy?

Kids: You don't know boozhy?!

Me: Nope, I've never heard boozhy before.

Kids: Boozhy's like preppie people. Yeah, you know those fancy people who think they're better than you? That's boozhy.

Me: Hmmmm. . .(writing "bourgeoisie" on the board). . .anybody know this word?

Kids: Oh yeah, some French thing.

So I talked briefly about the bourgeoisie within the context of the French Revolution and then within the context of Marxist theory (I like to keep it real on a Friday). And then. . .

Kids: Well that's just like boozhy.

Me: Mmm-hmm.

Kids: That's probably where boozhy comes from.

Me: Pretty cool, huh?

Then I went on (and on and on, apparently) about how interesting it is to study where words come from and how cool language is until one student said, "Dude, you get way too excited about words," at which point I told them they were all "wack" and retreated to my desk to contemplate etymology in silence.

Addendum 05-03-06: Josh, a madras-wearin' Jay-Z fan, has informed me that "boozhy" is actually spelled "boozy." I defer to his mad knowledge of gansta rap.