The LastStraw/Frank McNally: Booing is all the rage lately among Irish sports audiences. It now rivals the Mexican wave as the most popular form of self-expression at Lansdowne Road, and its use there against Glasgow Rangers players is currently the subject of a complaint to UEFA.
But at GAA venues - where appearances of Glasgow Rangers players are still rare - the recent targets have been politicians.
As a non-violent form of protest, booing could be considered harmless, even quaint. But it can be a deadly weapon, as Mick McCarthy discovered last autumn. So although it has been well known for a while that the Government is as popular as SARS, it was still shocking to hear Bertie Ahern booed by fellow Dublin supporters in Clones last Sunday. And no surprise when Maurice Ahern felt compelled to defend his sports-mad brother during the week, writing poignantly of how the Taoiseach, as a boy, "picked and snipped gooseberries" for ticket money.
But the question you're probably asking is this: where did the practice of booing originate, and how did the simple word "boo" ever become such a potent form of mass protest?
Well, it's a good question, and I'm glad you asked; but the truth is we just don't know. All we can say with certainty is that booing is essentially a collective enterprise. Like the Mexican wave, it's not something you can do on your own without looking silly. As to its origins, these are every bit as obscure as the origins of the light aircraft that flew over Croke Park during the Special Olympics closing ceremony trailing the banner "Thank you, Bertie". Like the aircraft, the term seems to have taken off on its own.
My Oxford English Dictionary speculates that the word "boo", expressing "disapproval or contempt", originated as an imitation of the noise made by a "cow". But even if this were true (and, for it to be true, the cow would have to have a head-cold), surely nobody in search of a sound articulating opposition to anything would look for it among cows, who are notoriously supportive of the status quo.
A contributor to one of the many etymological websites on the internet suggests an alternative: that the word could be related to "bubo," the inflammatory tumefaction of the groin or armpit that was a symptom of bubonic plague. And certainly, in the context of the Dubs fans last Sunday, I think this is at least as plausible as the cow theory.
Interestingly, "boo" is also one of the many slang terms for marijuana. And even though this is a modern usage, dictionaries agree that its origin is also unknown or forgotten. This is hardly surprising, given that the originator of the term was probably smoking boo at the time he thought of it.
As I've pointed out before, many of the expressions we use date from a more pastoral age, and their original meaning is now lost to urban minds. We still understand that to be a person who "wouldn't say boo to a goose" is to be timid. But while we can just about imagine circumstances where we might say boo to a cow (for example if we had a head-cold) it's nearly impossible to envisage where or why you would say this, or anything, to a goose.
Equally, a modern person might assume - wrongly - that there was an ancient connection between geese and gooseberries. All of us who picked gooseberries as young boys (I never snipped, personally - that was women's work) wondered about this.
No less a person than the lexicographer Samuel Johnson made the mistake of assuming a connection: namely that gooseberry sauce was a popular accompaniment for roast goose (and, by the way, what was sauce for the goose usually worked well with the gander too).
In fact, as is now generally known, the word gooseberry is a corruption of "groseberry," from the French groseille. In a similar misunderstanding, the cucumber was known for centuries as the "cowcumber," and God knows what the OED made of that.
Anyway, to get back to the origins of this column, which are now obscure or forgotten, another popular theory about the word "boo" is that it relates to the sound of crying child, as in "boo-hoo". And even allowing that, outside of cartoons, I have never heard a crying child make a sound remotely approximating to "boo-hoo," this seems by far the most plausible explanation for the term's popularity as an expression of protest.
If this is true, then booing is essentially childish behaviour. This will be little comfort to Bertie Ahern, however, for whom the practice could be more damaging than any opinion polls. A whole summer of this, and his gooseberries will be cooked.