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.

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.

"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)

And then of course there's this definition:

quote:

a familiar name for a cow or calf.