In an earlier episode, the hosts talked about the slang term bobo, meaning “stupid” or “inferior.” Many listeners wrote in to discuss about their own use of bobo and its variants, and to point out that bobos also refers to a kind of cheap canvas shoes. Grant reports on some of their emails. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Slang Term “Bobo””
You’re listening to A Way with Words. I’m Martha Barnette.
And I’m Grant Barrett. You know, Martha, we did a segment a little bit ago in which I mentioned some slang used at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.
It was a list collected by Professor Connie Ebley. Remember that?
Yep.
Well, one of the words that I mentioned and said I didn’t know was bobo to mean something that’s kind of, I don’t know, crummy or not so great.
Oh, yeah, bobo.
Yeah, and you know what’s crazy? This one word, four letters, reduplicated, Bobo, has generated so much traffic, so much email, phone calls, so many things just showing up where people say, I’ve got something to say about Bobo.
And it’s kind of wonderful.
From all over the country, Jeff from Virginia responded and said, in the late 1970s, in the early 1980s, it meant shoes that were not of a popular brand name or of no brand name.
And apparently there was a brand name of cheap shoes called the Bobos, or so many people swear.
And his response was very typical of this.
Tracy Stiegel emailed us and she says,
My daughter is 17 in Atlanta, and she uses Bobo to describe something that is cheap or poorly made.
A rickety chair would be all Bobo.
And then we got an email from Adrian Akers who said,
My uncle married a Korean woman several years ago,
And our family began to hear the word Bobo quite frequently as a Korean way of saying that something was shoddy or kind of stupid.
And so I did a bit of digging on that, and it turns out there is a Korean word, pabo, P-A-B-O in English, which means idiot.
And so maybe that’s what she was hearing and not bobo.
In any case, there’s a ton of this stuff where people just have something to say about this word bobo.
I was really surprised that it was so widespread.
Yeah, it is.
And, of course, it’s reinforced by Spanish bobo, which means foolish.
Yeah, I’m sure there’s some influence there.
Molly in Arlington, Virginia, said you would use it in her elementary school in Boston.
She said it was almost always a pejorative, but there was this bizarrely proud and upbeat song that went with it.
The Bobo song, she said, was set to the tune of Conal Bogie’s March from the movie Bridge on the River Kauai.
And she said the lyrics I can remember went as follows.
Bobos, they make your feet feel fine.
Bobos, only $8.99.
It’s something like that, right?
Anyway, thanks, Molly, for that, for the laugh.
And thanks to everyone else, including Derek in Nashville and Karen and Elizabeth and Victor and everyone else.
Well, if you have a question or comment about language, we want to hear about it.
Call the Bobos at 1-877-929-9673.
That’s 1-877-Wayword.
