You Learn Something New Everyday

So yesterday at work the team is sitting around having a lunch in honor of our new kindergarten teammate. She puts cheese on her sandwich and says "be right back, gonna melt the cheese". To which one of my coworkers responds "Ohhh, you gettin' all booji now, huh." (spelling approximated- j sound like a French j in joie de vive)

To which I look at them, and say, "Booji? What's that... one of your made up words?" Note to the reader: I'm the only white person on my team. They're all like, no, it's a real word. I look to another coworker and ask what it means. She replies I'm getting all booji now, by askin'. Finally they tell me it means acting stuck up, or thinking you're better than someone else.

So I'm wondering where does this word come from? Could it be bourgeoise? But that doesn't make sense, since to my mind bourgeoise meant common people. So I ask a coworker how to spell it, and I should have known better. She shrugs like she never thought of how it'd be spelled and says "b-o-o-g-y".

Yesterday afterschool I went over to Mr. Artist's place. Mr. Artist, btw, is Black. He knows the word! Better yet, he says it was often a word he'd had applied to him, and he tells me it *does* come from bourgeois. Damn I love a smart man. When I said this didn't make sense to me, given my understanding of the word, he said it was used because the black person wasn't acting "black", but acting as if they were better than that, middle class even. This seems weird to me, but maybe it's because I grew up middle class, and white to boot. Somethings I will probably never understand since I'm not black. And that's ok. At least I can learn.