Illustration of a booby by Thomas Herbert, 1634
16 October 2023
What I love most about what I do is that my work strikes many cultural touchstones throughout the centuries, but this one takes the cake, running the gamut from nursery slang to Elizabethan drama to seabirds to nautical justice to the Free Silver movement and ending up with Civil War pornography
Booby, and the clipped form boob, can mean many things. It can mean a fool, a type of seabird, or a woman’s breast. A booby hatch is a prison or mental hospital, and booby prizes are awarded to losers. Most of these senses are etymologically related, but the breast sense comes from a different etyma.
The fool/childish sense is the oldest and is of uncertain origin. There are two main contenders as to the origin, and either, or both, may be correct—independent coinages that reinforce one another. It could arise out of a nursery variation on babe or baby. Alternatively, it may come from the Spanish bobo, meaning stupid or a fool. The seabird sense most likely comes from the Spanish, borrowed into English by sailors, as the name of the bird is attested in half a century earlier in that language than English.
Booby, referring to a fool or a childish person, appears at the end of the sixteenth century. George Peele’s 1595 play The Old Wiues Tale has a clown character named Booby. And the word is used as an epithet in the c. 1600 play Club Law:
Why, what a company of bobies were yee? could you not catch him?
And later in the play there is this line:
Make rome Gentlemen, you gamesters what bobies you be.
Thomas Dekker uses the word in its present-day spelling in two of his plays. The first being his 1602 play Satiro-Mastix:
You lye s[i]r varlet sir villaine, I am sir Salamanders, ounds, is my man Master Peter Salamanders face as vrse as mine; Sentlemen, all and Ladies, and you say once or twice Amen, I will lap this little Silde, this Booby in his blankets agen.
And the second being The Pleasant Comodie of Patient Grisill:
By Cod is meane ta let Gwenthyan see what bobie foole loue her, apogs on you.
The name of the seabird (genus Sula) probably comes from their reputation for being none too bright, being easily caught and eaten by sailors. As mentioned above, this sense of word is almost certainly a borrowing from Spanish. The name appears in English in Samuel Purchas’s Purchas His Pilgrimes, a 1625 collection of travel accounts. This passage is found in a description of Sierra Leone:
Of Fowles are Pellicans, white, as bigge as Swannes, with a large and long bill; Hearnes, Curlews, Boobies, Oxe-eyes, with diuers strange kindes of water-fowles.
And this passage, from Thomas Herbert’s 1634 A Relation of Some Yeares Travaile, makes reference to the bird’s supposed low intelligence:
The foure and twentieth of May, we were vnder nineteene degrees and thirty one minutes of South latitude, where one of the Saylers espying a Bird filty called a Booby, hee mounted to the top-mast and tooke her. The foolish quality of which Bird to sit still, not valuing danger, which Bird I haue simply depicted as you see.
Sailors also bequeathed us the term booby hatch. The term originally referred to a cover for a hatch leading down into the lower decks, intended to prevent foolish sailors, or boobies, from falling down into the hold. Over time the term for the hatch cover transferred down to the space below. By the mid nineteenth century, a booby hatch was a place in the hold used as a jail or brig for disobedient sailors.
There is this description an 1842 case before a court in the United States:
The case in the Marine Court was for unnecessarily severe punishment. Plaintiff was ordered to mend a sail, and refused, alleging that he shipped as a seaman and not as a sail maker. He was immediately ordered over the side, to scrape the vessel, but refused, alleging that the employment was dangerous, as the vessel was under way; he was willing to go if a boat were lowered, ready to pick him up in case of his falling overboard.
He was then put in irons, confined in the booby hatch, where he could neither sit nor stand, and could only lie in an uneasy position; kept there till the next morning, then flogged, replaced in the booby hatch, and kept there until afternoon, when, by the advice of his shipmates, he consented to go over the side.
The Court charged that the officers of the vessel had a right to flog a seaman, provided it were done in a proper manner, but they had no right to put a man in irons, unless in case of mutiny, no shade of which appeared to exist in the present case. The general course of the captain and mate seemed to be kind to their crew. Verdict for the plaintiff, $14 damages, and 6 cents costs.
And there is this from the Boston Semi Weekly Courier of 23 October 1851:
The punishment was inflicted on the 27th ult., and Pryson died five days after. The complainant and principal witness, William Frill, testified that the captain flogged the deceased several times with a three-inch rope, for alleged remissness of duty, and subsequently confined him in the “booby hatch,” a most unwholesome place.
By 1859, booby hatch had come ashore and into the jargon of US police forces. In that year George W. Matsell, a former New York City police commissioner, published Vocabulum; or, the Rogue’s Lexicon, which included this entry:
BOOBY-HATCH. Station-house; watch-house.
Presumably such station houses had jails or holding cells for prisoners, because we see this in the Omaha World-Herald of 18 February 1894:
Mr. Sheckles made objections to the manner in which his wealth was distributed, but his objections were overruled. He took exceptions to the ruling and sailed in a la Corbett, but was neatly stopped by Referee Ryan, the man in blue, who called the golden chariot and landed the gang in the booby hatch.
Corbett is a reference to boxer “Gentleman Jim” Corbett (1866–1933), and “Ryan,” the “man in blue,” is obviously a police officer.
The use of booby hatch to refer to a mental hospital was in place by the end of the nineteenth century. Journalist Finley Peter Dunner, creator of the fictional Irish-American bartender Mr. Dooley, put this commentary about advocates for Free Silver in the mouth of his creation on 2 October 1896:
They’re crazy, plumb daffy, Jawnny. In this whole city iv Chicago there ain’t wan hundred silver men that culdn’t give post-graduate insthructions to th’ inmates iv th’ booby hatch out at Dunning. Not wan hundhred.
Finally, to wrap up the discussion of this etymon, the phrase booby prize appears to have arisen in the jargon of the card game of progressive euchre in the 1880s. A booby prize is awarded to the loser of a contest and is usually a gag prize. From the Detroit Free Press of 28 December 1884:
At a recent game a painted pipe tied with ribbon and filled with candy was given as a booby prize.
And this from Michigan’s Jackson Daily Citizen of 14 February 1885 with a less desirable booby prize:
At a recent progressive euchre party the booby prize was a live mouse in a box.
The use of booby to refer to the female breast probably got its start as a seventeenth-century nursery word in the form bubby. It’s likely echoic in origin, reminiscent of the sound of sucking. There are similar words in a number of European languages: Middle High German buobe, Swiss-German Bübbi or Büppi, French poupe, and the Italian poppa.
We see bubby in Youths Lookinglass, a 1660 poem that describes the process of growing up:
Thus void of sense twelve months dully spent,
The child no pleasure knows, nor Nurse content,
But time progreding [sic] the child grows amain
And now some little sense it doth obtain,
Whilst lying in the lap it laughs and smiles
Which pretty charms the mothers heart beguiles,
It gapes and crows and playes before it stands
Grasping the Nurses Bubbies with its hands,
Playing with the breasts, being nourished by sleep
The pretty boy at length begins to creep
About the house, and tumble up and down,
Thus tis with all, though born to great renown.
The present-day spelling booby dates to the mid nineteenth century. And the earliest known use of this spelling, unlike the wholesome Youths Lookinglass, is in the very pornographic 1865 The Love Feast. The following lines describe bridesmaids preparing the bride for her wedding bed:
While one, more wanton than the rest
Seized on love’s moss-bounded nest.
And cried, “Poor puss shall have a treat
For the first time of juicy meat.”
While one my rosy nipples seized,
And my ripe, rounded boobies squeezed,
‘til stiff each little rosebud stood,
Like cuckoo pintles in the bud.
This sense of booby, however, wouldn’t commonly be seen in print until the mid twentieth century.
Sources:
“City Intelligence.” Boston Semi Weekly Courier (Massachusetts), 23 October 1851, 2/5. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.
Club Law (c. 1600). G.C. Moore Smith, ed. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1907, 1.4, 5 and 4.6, 79. HathiTrust Digital Archive.
Dekker, Thomas. The Pleasant Comodie of Patient Grisill. London: Edward Allde for Henry Rocket, 1603, sig. C3r. Early English Books Online (EEBO).
———. Satiro—Mastix. London: Edward Allde for Edward White, 1602, sig. I3r. Early English Books Online (EEBO).
Dunne, Finley Peter. “Philosopher Dooley Talks; In Doubt About His Vote.” Atlanta Journal (Georgia) (orig. published in the Chicago Evening Post), 2 October 1896, 4/5. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.
“General State News.” Jackson Daily Citizen (Michigan) (orig. published in the Grand Rapids Leader), 14 February 1885, 4/6. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.
Green’s Dictionary of Slang, n.d., s.v. booby, n.1, boob, n.2, booby, n.2, boob, n.3, boob, n.1.
Herbert, Thomas. A Relation of Some Yeares Travaile. London: William Stansby and Jacob Bloome, 1634, 10. Early English Books Online (EEBO).
The Love Feast (1865). In Thomas P. Lowry. The Story the Soldiers Wouldn’t Tell: Sex in the Civil War. Mechanicsburg, PA: Stackpole Books, 1994, 58. Google Books.
Matsell, George W. Vocabulum; or, the Rogue’s Lexicon. New York: 1859, 13. HathiTrust Digital Archive.
“Never Again.” Omaha World-Herald (Nebraska), 18 February 1894, 9/7. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.
Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, September 2018, s.v., booby, n.1, boob, n.1, booby, n.2, boob, n.2.
Peele, George. The Old Wiues Tale. London: John Danter, 1595. Early English Books Online (EEBO).
“Punishment of Sailors.” New York Commercial Advertiser, 22 April 1842, 2/1. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.
Purchas, Samuel. Purchas His Pilgrimes in Five Books. London: William Stansby for Henrie Fetherstone, 1625, 416. Early English Books Online (EEBO).
“Social Bric-A-Brac.” Detroit Free Press (Michigan), 28 December 1884, 14/3. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.
Youths Lookinglass. London: J. Williamson, 1660, 6. Google Books.
Image credit:
Booby bird, Thomas Herbert, 1634. In A Relation of Some Yeares Travaile. London: William Stansby and Jacob Bloome, 1634, 11. Early English Books Online (EEBO). Public domain image.