And how old is “book”, as in “book passage”?
Regional variations. “Book” was in use, meaning “to leave,” before “boogie” among all the Great Lakes speakers I knew. Boogie, indicating dancing, eventually transformed to simply “move” and then “to move away” in the same area at a later time.
This does not mean that the meanings in other areas could not have had a different time line. However, I have never seen any indication that book or boogie came from the other, although their similarity may have influenced their adoption from one group to the next. Given that “book” meaning “to leave” is over 30 years old, I am a bit curious why it has so little attestation. I am guessing “book” meaning “to move quickly” was a later transformation from “to leave (quickly)” and I never heard that meaning until the 1980s.
When used around 1971, “book” was pretty clearly a shortening of “book a flight outta here.”
My version of the OED attests it from 1841.
What I mean is that boogie was in common use prior to “book” as in “to move away quickly”. it does not have to be prior to “book passage” to be a legitimate origin.
When? and where?
Interestingly, The Master addressed the issue of “boogie” to mean movement (with no specific context of moving in a direction) in 1974 in the article What’s the origin of the word “boogie”?
This is consistent with my memory of the meaning of that word. (Which might mean only that Cece and I were out of touch with cutting edge slang of the period, but does indicate that it had not come into general use to mean “leaving” by the early 1970s.)
Well, the term book “to move” seems to have come into use in the late 60’s early 70’s, roughly. Boogie has been used to describe music as far back ass the 20’s. John Lee Hooker hit the top of the R&B charts in 1948 with Boogie Chillen His use of boogie suggests dancing at a swing club, so it has implied movement (at least shaking your booty) for quite a while.
So I would set a timeline that looks roughly like this:
1920s - boogie - dance
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1930s? - boogie - movement (implied dance)
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1960s - book - exit quickly (late 1960s)
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1970s - boogie - move in some direction
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1980s - book - move quickly (as if fleeing)
Just asked my dad as I recall him from my childhood calling ‘Let’s boogie!’ when he wanted to get moving somewhere.
SoCal at the time. But raised in rural Louisiana.
So we’ve got ‘boogie’ being used for ‘let’s go’ in the early-mid 1970s in Los Angeles though filtered through a man who would have little contact with teen slang at the time. I suspect southern or lower Mississippi Valley influence on my dad’s word choice there. If that’s the case he would have picked it up in the late 1940s through the mid to late 1950s.
But this doesn’t mean “book”, as in exit quickly, came from “boogie”. The term could have originated independently. I have never encounted someone use “boog” as a short form of “boogie”. Which I would expect if “book” came from “boogie”.
Nor am I saying it does. I’m just tossing a regional data point out.