One of the nifty thing about library sales is that you can pick up reference books - you know, the ones you're usually not allowed to take out - for practically nothing. This one is /The Facts on File Encyclopedia of Word and Phrase Origins/, by Robert Hedrickson. It's a great one for just browsing through and reading up on this and that. It's not as comprehensive as a good dictionary, but it is pretty fun. Anyway: boss. Early Americans, independent and democratic, never liked the word "master" with all its aristocratic associations. Late in the 18th century they adopted the Dutch word /baas/ meaning the same thing, and were soon spelling it /boss/. By as early as 1838 /boss/ had achieved common usage and writers as prominent as James Fenimore Cooper were condemning it as a barbaric vulgarization of the language. Some people think that /boss/ as an adjective meaning the best, the greatest, is recent teenage slang, but the word has been used in the same sense since the mid-19th century.