I love the Urban Dictionary, a wiki-style dictionary of yoof slang. And today my faith has been rewarded. It seems, you see, that the Lambeth secondary schoolchildren who were visited today by Tony Blair and Ruth Kelly hailed their esteemed guests with exclamations of "boom, boom". Fuddy-duddy old hacks naturally interpreted this as a boo, but the more eloquent young folk point out that boom is an expression of respect, rather in the manner of "ave" or "vivat". Tony Thorne, author of the Bloomsbury Dictionary of Contemporary Slang, says it signifies "approval or delight". The Urban Dictionary agrees:
3. Boom adjective used to describe a pretty girl. "yo guy, that girl is BOOM"
16. boom means cool, awesome, or fetch
We all know as well that young people's slang often seems wilfully perverse; a reliable informant tells me that an extreme expression of approval at the moment is to declare something "da bomb" - a thing of which I was much afeared in my own youth.
Still, something about the episode troubles me. Now, I have no credibility issue with boom being an expression of approval. I have no particular credibility issue with children approving of Mr Blair and Ms Kelly. But "delight"?
