Bruce Springsteen in concert in East Germany, 19 July 1988
10 April 2024
The word boss has many different meanings with many different etymologies, but most of these senses of the word are uncommon or archaic. The dominant meaning of boss is that of a supervisor or person in charge. That sense comes from the Dutch baas, brought into English via the Dutch settlement of New Netherlands along the Hudson River valley in what is now New York. Besides the supervisory meaning, the Dutch word has an older, more familial sense of uncle, which makes the word related to the German Base, meaning cousin, and its Old High German forebear basa, meaning aunt. So the word probably went from meaning respected elder who should be obeyed to that of a supervisor.
The earliest use of boss in English that I know of was recorded in Maximilian Schele de Vere’s 1872 Americanisms, although I have been unable to find the source he quotes. That source is M. Philipse’s 1679 Early Voyage to New Netherlands. The Philipse family was a prominent one in the Dutch colony of New Netherlands, but I can’t identify which member of that family this is, nor have I found a copy of the said book. As quoted by Schele de Vere, the passage reads:
Here they had their first interview with the female boss or supercargo of the vessel.
The first verifiable use of the word that I know of is in a 26 May 1806 letter by Washington Irving, who with his stories of the early nineteenth-century New York records many of the first uses of Dutch words borrowed into English. The opening of the letter reads:
I have just received your most welcome lines of the 24th; and being immediately sent out on an errand, I amused myself with reading them along the street; the consequence was, I stumbled twice into the gutter; overset an old market-woman, and plumped head and shoulders into the voluminous bosom of a fat negro wench, who was sweating and smoking in all the rankness of a summer heat. I was stopped two or three times by acquaintances to know what I was laughing so heartily at; and by the time I had finished the letter, I had completely forgotten the errand I was sent on; so I had to return, make an awkward apology to boss, and look like a nincompoop.
Of course, no discussion of boss would be complete with mentioning The Boss, that is the man, himself, Bruce Springsteen. The musician has been known by that moniker since at least 1976. From an article about “Southside” Johnny Lyon in Trenton, New Jersey’s Sunday Times Advertiser of 27 June 1976:
A recent Village Voice article drew some highly negative comparison’s [sic] between Lyon and Bruce “The Boss” Springsteen. The author didn’t much care for their music either.
Sources:
Green’s Dictionary of Slang, n.d., s.v. boss, n.2.
Irving, Washington. Letter to Gouveneur Kemble, 26 May 1806. In The Life and Letters of Washington Irving, vol. 1, Pierre M. Irving, ed. New York: G.P. Putnam, 1864, 170–71. Gale Primary Sources: Sabin Americana.
Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. boss, n.6, boss, v.2, bossy, adj.2.
Philipse, M. Early Voyage to New Netherlands (1679). Quoted in Maximilian Schele de Vere. Americanisms. New York: Charles Scribner, 1872, 91. HathiTrust Digital Archive.
Sauter, Eric. “Southside Johnny and the Talk of Asbury Park.” Sunday Times Advertiser (Trenton, New Jersey), 27 June 1976, This Week Magazine 8–10 at 10.
Image credit: Thomas Uhlemann, 1988. Wikimedia Commons. Deutsches Bundesarchiv. Used under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Germany license.