ABOUT THAT WORD. "Booya," also spelled "Booyah," is used as an interjection to signal satisfaction or accomplishment. ESPN's Stuart Scott and Jim Cramer of CNBC's "Mad Money" helped popularize the catch phrase. (The food called booya, a simple meat stew c (2024)

PLEASE define for me the word "nomesane."

I can never find it in the dictionary, but I hear it used all the time, so it must be a word.

What about "zup"?

It is a commonly used word, but those who wrote the dictionaries I own somehow omitted it, too.

Americans always seem to butcher the English language. Part of the reason for doing this is because we are a nation of many cultures. Sometimes, we just take a word from Spanish, Italian or French, utter something in English that sounds somewhat similar, and make it an American word.

To this extent, we speak American, not English, as many in Great Britain have long contended.

Mostly, though, we just butcher the English language out of laziness. We don't want to take the time and effort to discover the correct meaning and pronunciation of a word we really don't know; we just blurt out something that sounds vaguely like it.

We have always done this. There is a river in southern Colorado, for example, that the early Spanish explorers, being Catholic, named The River of the Lost Souls in Purgatory.

By the time American settlers in the area finished butchering the name, the river became the Picketwire, which it is still called today.

We do all kinds of crazy things with our language, often in an attempt to sound well-educated and important. The most common is to add prefixes and suffixes to create words that really don't exist.

In the 1960s and '70s, we added "wise" to every word in the dictionary. I had a teacher in high school who did this on a regular basis, and I often wanted to tell him how ridiculous it sounded. But out of respect, I never did.

"Bulletwise, it was a .45-caliber."

Why not just say, "It was a .45-caliber bullet"?

"Weatherwise, it was raining."

Just say, "It was raining." We all know that rain is associated with weather.

In the 1980s, we migrated to the California Valley Girl dialect, which many still speak today.

"I'm like, 'Hey, dude! What's happening?'"

The word the speaker really means is "said." "I said, 'Hey dude! What's happening?'"

Used in this twisted context, "like" takes on the meaning of "similar to." The speaker, thus, is saying that he is similar to "Hey dude! What's happening?" This, of course, makes no sense whatsoever.

By the end of the 20th century, we were spitting out the prefix "pre" as often as we had been using the suffix "wise."

"Pre" was (and still is) especially big in low-budget TV commercials. Used or secondhand cars became pre-owned cars, for example.

The term "used cars" makes perfect sense. "Pre-owned cars" doesn't.

The prefix "pre," of course, means before. Pre-owned cars, thus, are cars that were owned before they were owned, which implies a pile of nuts and bolts.

Then, too, everyone is "pre-qualified" for a credit card or a loan. How can you be qualified before you are qualified? What the commercial writer really means is that the person is qualified in advance or, more appropriately, "We know you're probably not going to make your payments, but we're going to give you the money anyway."

All excited about something, my son came home one day several years ago yelling, "Booya!"

"What does 'booya' mean?" I asked.

Of course, he didn't know.

Well, it is a classic butchering of "Oh, yeah!"

Which brings us back to "nomesane" and "zup."

If you haven't figured these two words out yet, "nomesane" is a slurred version of "Do you know what I am saying?" It is used at the end of an explanation to ask the listener if he understands what he has just heard.

"Zup" is a form of greeting, a lazy person's way of asking, "What's up?"

Yes, we have invented a strange language that keeps getting stranger by the day.

"Zup, dude! Transportationwise, I'm gonna like use my pre-approved loan and go down and get me a pre-owned car so I can ride around, nomesane?"

Makes the Picketwire seem like a clear translation, doesn't it?