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When and how, but more importantly, why did the word "boss" become synonymous with "wonderful"? It seems that every advertisement uses the word to refer to their product now.
 
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The OED Online:
quote:
Etymology: < Dutch baas master (older sense ‘uncle’), supposed to be related to German base female cousin, Old High German basa ‘aunt’.

c. attrib. Of persons: master, chief. Of things: most esteemed, ‘champion’. Now esp. in U.S. slang: excellent, wonderful; good, ‘great’; masterly.

1836 in J. R. Commons Doc. Hist. Amer. Industr. Soc. (1910) IV. 287, I am a boss shoemaker.

Online Etymology Dictionary

quote:
The slang adjective meaning "excellent" is recorded in 1880s, revived, apparently independently, in teen and jazz slang in 1950s.


World Wide Words

quote:
... the slang sense of boss that has become common among young English-speaking people recently, and which means “excellent, first-rate, superlative” (it started in the US at least as far back as the sixties, though some writers argue it’s a nineteenth-century formation, too).


I can see how boss could be applied to something seen as superior in the same way that your supervisor(superior)at work is your boss. I realize you're retired now, but you still have a boss. And you better be nice to her. And keep working on that honey do list.
 
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"Boss sauce" was a sauce served by Macheesemo Mouse, a fast food chain in Portland, Oregon, back in the 1970s. It lived up to the definition of being superlative. Alas, the chain died when its founder did, craching a perfectly good De Haviland Canada Beaver into the Willamette River - a double loss if, like me, you're an aeroplane freak who loves "healthy Mexican food." (They only used fresh, mostly organic ingrredients)
 
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And then of course there's this definition:
quote:
a familiar name for a cow or calf.
 
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