Question 1

What does “ace boon coon” mean?

Accepted Answer

Your closest friend — the one you would trust with anything — named in a rhyming three-beat phrase that takes a word whites used as a slur and turns it into an endearment.

Question 2

Where does “ace boon coon” come from?

Accepted Answer

This is a Black American phrase of the middle twentieth century, and the documentary trail runs through Black print. The shorter form comes first: Langston Hughes and Arna Bontemps's The Book of Negro Folklore, published in 1958, glosses boon-coon as bosom friend and gives the example sentence Stacy's my boon-coon. The full three-part phrase is first documented in 1962, in Burn, Killer, Burn!, the novel Paul Crump wrote on death row at Cook County Jail in Chicago and published through the Black-owned Johnson Publishing Company. The Oxford English Dictionary's earliest evidence is also 1962, which is an independent confirmation of the floor. From there the phrase spreads visibly through Black writing — Piri Thomas in Down These Mean Streets in 1967, Barry Beckham in My Main Mother in 1969 — and by 1980 the linguist Edith Folb, working with Black teenagers in South Central Los Angeles, was documenting ace, ace coon, ace boon coon and ace coon poon as a graded vocabulary of friendship. Green's Dictionary of Slang labels the phrase originally US Black. One dating claim needs correcting: the phrase is sometimes pushed back to the 1930s on the strength of the trombonist Dicky Wells's memoir Night People, which uses it in a scene set in that decade. Night People was published in 1971. It is a memory of the 1930s, not a record made in the 1930s, and it cannot carry the date. Nothing currently in evidence puts the full phrase before 1962.