![]() ![]() ![]() “Little Nina, grown more bold climbed up beside him, and poised upon one foot, her fat arm resting on his neck, played ‘peek-a-boo’ beneath the shade, screaming at every ‘peek,’ ‘I seen your eyes, I did’ ” ( Darkness and Daylight, an 1864 novel by the American writer Mary Jane Holmes). However, the dictionary’s first literal example in writing is from a 19th-century novel about an orphan girl who unravels the mystery of her parentage: Undoubtedly, the term was used literally to mean the game itself in speech long before 1600. “I’le lay my life this is my husbands dotage, I thought so, nay neuer play peeke-boe with me, I know you do nothing but studie how to anger me sir” ( The Comicall Satyre of Every Man Out of His Humor, 1600, a play by Ben Jonson). Here a wife dismisses her husband’s romantic overtures as child’s play: The OED defines the compound “peekaboo” as “a game played with a young child which involves hiding oneself, or one’s face, and suddenly reappearing, saying ‘peekaboo.’ ” However, the OED’s earliest written example uses the term figuratively. The dictionary’s earliest example of the exclamation clearly used in its scary sense is from a long poem inspired by London’s plague of 1625: “When a child cryes boh / To fright his Nurse” (from Britain’s Remembrancer, 1628, by George Wither, an English pamphleteer, satirist, and poet).Īnd here’s an example with the usual modern spelling: “Boo is a word that’s used in the North of Scotland to frighten crying Children” (from The Scotch Presbyterian Eloquence, 1692, by J. “Speke now let me se, / And say ones bo / Than he toke her by the heed / And sayd dame art thou deed” ( A Treatyse of the Smyth Whych That Forged Hym a New Dame, 1565). Scholars say the poem was composed around 1360 the OED’s 1565 citation is from the most complete copy known to exist. The Oxford English Dictionary’s earliest citation, which we’ve expanded, is from an anonymous medieval tale of a blacksmith who fashions a woman at his forge. The exclamation was spelled “bo” when it first appeared in writing in the 16th century (it was certainly used much earlier in speech). The word for the game is a compound made of the verb “peek,” the combining form “-a-,” and an exclamation (variously spelled over the years as “bo,” “boe,” “boh,” “boo,” and “bough”) intended to surprise or frighten someone. ![]() With Halloween coming up, I wonder if there’s any connection between the “boo” to scare someone and the “boo” in “peek-a-boo.”Ī: Yes, there is a connection between the “boo” used to scare people on Halloween and the “boo” in the children’s game “peekaboo,” a term now usually written without hyphens. Q: I’m a mom with an almost 2-year-old son. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |