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Volume CXXXIII, Number 14 |
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Booyah and chickens- Who knew?
SARAH RAMEY
If I had to pick a favorite word, I'm pretty sure it would be 'Booyah.' Being a)female and b)white as white comes, I find that it has absolutely no place in any sentence I could ever conceive of saying, and therefore has all the more reason to be used on a regular basis. I think a little Booyah around campus might just give us the edge we're looking for.
STUDENT: Hi Elaine…I'm really sorry, but I forgot my card.
ELAINE: Booyah! Write down your ID number on this sheet of paper. Next.
--or--
PROFESSOR: Can anyone take us to a passage that spoke to them? Yes, go
ahead Cassie.
CASSIE (a timid student): Um, I thought page 74, second paragraph down
that talks about music was good…because I'm a musician. It resonated
with me.
PROFESSOR: Very nice, Cassie.
CASSIE (Standing and pointing at said professor): Booyah!
Because the thing is, what is Booyah? I mean, really.
But rather than simply letting that oft-posed query "what is Booyah?"
stand as rhetorical, well, I'll tell you what I did instead. I went to
the Internet, the place where any and everything has been documented in
some ridiculous fashion by some ridiculous person with ridiculous passions
for such compelling topics as Booyah.
Let me preface this by saying that it is not easy to make a web page.
No, it is not as much "simple" or "straightforward"
but rather more along the lines of Supremely Impossible and Utterly Hopeless.
Long ago in some moment of total idiocy and self delusion I attempted
to learn. Not only did it confirm my suspicions of my own gaping void
in the left-most regions of my brain, but it brought to my attention that
making a web page requires a staggering amount of dedication and patience.
So what I'm saying is, someone had to sit down at their computer for a
significant amount of time, typety type type, to create an entire page
about….Booyah.
Anyways, back to my research. In my extensive web search, the one result
that caught my eye was a site entitled "What in the world is Booyah?"
Now, I would have been perfectly satisfied with a definition of the word
in terms of its usage in common slang…however, what I got nearly
made me wet myself right then and there.
So now that you're on the edge of your seat, wondering what in the world Booyah is, here is what www.doorbell.net had to say about it, and I quote:
"Booyah (rhymes with doo-dah) is a chicken soup sometimes known
as Belgian penicillin. Belgian festivities where it is served in copious
amounts have been the subject of picketing by Chickens for a Sustainable
Future."
--author unknown (my personal favorite part of this whole mess)
If I had been forced at knifepoint to come up with a definition for 'Booyah'
in a dangerous game of Balderdash, I am fairly certain that in the realm
of possibile things I could have come up with, this would have ranked
in at about dead last.
Now, let us note: somewhere out there exists an organization entitled
Chickens for a Sustainable Future. An organization that has members. Members
who are living, breathing human beings, who actively chose to be members
of CFASF. And there is a distinct possibility that they may have T-shirts…and
in my mind, these shirts feature robust, smiling chickens raising the
roof. Why? I think why not is the more interesting question.
But that's beside the point. There is a soup, named Booyah, that on occasion
gets served in copious amounts …and this Booyah soup-serving has
prompted enough fury in the Chickens for a Sustainable Future community
for them to actually stage a protest.
I want you to imagine what exactly this implies: somebody probably had
to start a phone chain to rally the troops and alert them to the latest
Booyoutrage. Then they had to sit in their garages, making picket signs,
then carpool to whatever Belgian festivity was acting up, and spend the
better part of their day demonstrating to crowds of angry Booyah consumers.
AND, not to dwell on the subject, but what does Chickens for a Sustainable
Future even mean? Somehow the preservation of the chicken is how we are
intended to sustain our precarious future? Poo poo to the o-zone layer.
World hunger doesn't concern us. Why strive for peace on earth when there
are chickens to be saved from the murderous hands of the Booyah makers!
Luckily, amidst all of this total ridiculosity they did have the presence
of mind to dispel a common error surrounding this sensitive subject: the
mispronunciation of the word Booyah. Contrary to what you might think,
it does not rhyme with "hippopotamus" or "badger,"
but rather with "doo-dah." Exactly how it looks. Please take
note.
Sigh. This, my opening article for the spring season, has gone far beyond
where I had originally intended. I was going to write something about
how strange it is to be back, or the little things that I had missed,
or an elaborate story for why Julianna is no longer the premise for this
article…but, somehow, Booyah got the better of me, and, well, here
we are.
See you in two weeks with another installment of total non-sequitur.