Attaboy!
Or, The Male-Intimate Affectionate Overtones Questions

By Anatoly Liberman

At the end of the 15th century, youngsters in the streets of Amsterdam used to throw stones at one another and shout: “Boye, boye, egellentier!” Egellentier means “hedgehog,” but boye is puzzling. We seem to be reading a story of two gangs. One was called “The Hedgehogs” (bold, fierce, and prickly), and the other? Among the early meanings of boy, “devil” has been recorded, in both English and Dutch. Perhaps the rock throwing youths encouraged their comrades by shouting their gang’s name in the spirit of modern fans. Or perhaps all of them shrieked “devil, devil, hedgehog,” if it was a “generic” war cry. In any case, this touchingly familiar scene may cure some people of nostalgia for the past, when young people allegedly had the fear of God and violence was under control. The past, it turns out, was good to study, not to live in.

One should not jump to the conclusion that devil was a jocular synonym for “boy,” something like “poor devil.” From Old English only the proper name Boia has come down to us. Boy emerged in Middle English (no attestation before 1240) and first meant “servant,” as it did in more modern colonial English and still does in bellboy, busboy, and cowboy. The meaning “male child” developed later. However, long before that, numerous words designating noisy, dangerous objects and evil creatures began circulating over the huge territory of Eurasia. The syllable boo (we find it in the English verb boo and in peek-a-boo) is a reminder of that epoch. Sometimes a consonant—g or k–would be added to the frightening syllable, and then boogies/boogas, bugs, bogeymen, and bugbears would be born. From Frisia to Russia, babies stood in awe of someone called buka and its kin. Boy was a member of that unclean family, and so was German Bube.

Although words for supernatural creatures are expected to have a strange history, one notes with surprise that by the mid-15th century at the latest Engl. boy could mean both “devil” and “male child.” In Germany, the same happened to Bube. The coexistence of such pairs (boy/boy and Bube/Bube) could not always be quite peaceful, for the Devil was no one’s son, and no one would call one’s son “devil.” As a result, boy “devil” disappeared from the language, but in Germany, Bube, or more often, Bub’, has retained both meanings. Dutch has bui “gust, squall,” and Russian bui means “brave epic warrior.” Presumably, both are derived from the devils of old. The early history of such words is hidden, and researchers, of necessity, indulge in guesswork. Boo sounds like a baby word. In the beginning there seem to have been two nursery words: one denoted “baby” or “little brother,” whereas the other referred to an object of fright. While the first yielded “servant” (later “male child”), the second preserved its ancient meaning (“bogeyman”). Even if so, we are partly at a loss. How did buka cross language borders? Borrowing? (Unlikely, as long as we stay with the hypothesis of baby words.) Parallel development? (Too good to be true: a monosyllable would be easy too explain, but the disyllabic buka…) What is the cause of this devilry?

For the time being we will let imps and fiends do mischief in faraway lands and ask where attaboy! came from. This exclamation appeared so late in printed texts that looking for its ancient roots may appear absurd. Don’t we have an alteration of that’s a boy or of some other word group of the same type? Some authorities say so, but I find their suggestion unconvincing (for that’s a boy as an expression of encouragement is meaningless) and think that boy “devil” found its last refuge in hunters’ language, in which it acquired the meaning “hunted animal.” Can attaboy (or ataboy, as it is sometimes spelled, because no one knows the “right” spelling of this phrase) go back to a tout a boy!, considering that a tout, a call to incite dogs, was well-known? Other calls to the dogs are hoicks a boy and yoicks a Bewmont, this Bewmont beginning with a syllable suspiciously reminiscent of boy (anyway, who is Bewmont?) I once read in a popular book on word origins that attaboy has “a male-intimate affectionate sense.” If my etymology of attaboy is right, the opposite is true: neither peculiarly male nor intimate/affectionate.

Since attaboy is gibberish to modern speakers, it did not take long for the phrase to lose its beginning and degrade into oh, boy or simply boy (“Boy, I am so tired,” says a girl to her mother). Ours is an age of equal opportunity, and it was inevitable that oh, girl should surface in English. When that happened, the last tie with the Evil One was severed. Good for girls, good for all of us, except that boys will be boys.

Anatoly Liberman is the author of Word Origins…And How We Know Them. His column on word origins, The Oxford Etymologist, appears here each Wednesday. Send your etymology question to [email protected]; he’ll do his best to avoid responding with “origin unknown.”