boo-hooray

English

Etymology

A reference to the interjections boo and hooray which provide no information beyond the emotional reaction of the speaker.

Adjective

boo-hooray (comparative more boo-hooray, superlative most boo-hooray)

1. Having no meaning beyond the emotional reaction of the speaker; emotivist.
   • 1968, Great Britain. Parliament. House of Commons, Official Report of the Standing Committees:

     When I first came to the House of Commons I did not understand the legal use of the term " reasonable," which seemed to me a value judgment and to fall into the " boo-hooray " school.

   • 1978, Tony Becher, Stuart Maclure, Accountability in Education, page 76:

     It need not be a non-operational, merely 'boo-hooray' expression.

   • 1980, Trevor Pateman, Language, truth and politics, page 106:

     It hardly needs to be said that the results of this method are frustratingly dissatisfying, for the words tend to occur in speech and writing as mere boo-hooray words.

   • 2007, Russ Shafer-Landau, Oxford Studies in Metaethics - Volume 2, page 62:

     Old fashioned 'boo-hooray' forms of expressivism tell us nothing about utterances in which normative predicates are used in unasserted contexts, such as 'If lying is wrong then getting little brother to lie is wrong'.

   • 2013, C. Wilks, Emotion, Truth and Meaning: In Defense of Ayer and Stevenson:

     For rather than being 'thinly' emotive in the simplistic 'stimulus-respopnse' sense that would complement the 'thinly' emotive or 'boo-hooray' interpretation of the original ET which its critics based their criticisms upon, this theory...

Usage notes

This term is used predominantly in speaking of the "boo-hooray theory of ethics", a nickname for emotivism, which states that our moral judgements are nothing more than an expression of our emotional responses.