Part of Speech: noun
Pronunciation: ['bur or 'bu-wêr]
Definition: A lout, a grossly rude and tactless person.
Usage: Remember, boors are seldom bores, "How that boor got his FOOT in the punch bowl I'll never know; he usually keeps it tucked safely in his mouth." Rather, boors tend to behave rather vulgarly: "The giggling boys watched Gordon boorishly pick his nose and made bets on how he would dispose of the by-product."
Suggested Usage: Do not confuse today's word with "bore" [bor] (one of the few deverbal person nouns without the suffix –er: a writ-er writes and a read-er reads, but cooks, guides, and bores cook, write and bore). Boors are boorish and behave boorishly because of their boorishness. Most boors now live far from South Africa, where the boers are now gentleman farmers all, producing excellent wines, among other produce.
Etymology: From Afrikaans boer "farmer" related to Dutch boer and German Bauer "peasant farmer" and to Old English buan "dwell, live" from which contemporary "bower" is derived. To English colonialists in South Africa, the boers were rude and uncivilized, so they adopted the word in that sense, but misspelling in their own "civilized" way. The original root of today's word underlies the word for "be" in all Indo-European languages, and hence has too enormous a lexical progeny to be covered here. We do thank Christo Lombaard, himself of South Africa, for pointing out most unboorishly how English speakers shot themselves in the foot misborrowing today's word.
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