Meaning
To deliver a crushing blow or punishment; to scold harshly, crack down, or put a sudden stop to something, usually as lower the boom on someone. Merriam-Webster glosses it as dealing a crushing blow or punishment. The image is a ship's heavy spar - the boom - swinging down with force. Informal; nearly always constructed as lower the boom on someone or something. Do not confuse with the economic boom and bust, already catalogued here, which is a different sense of the word. Regional use: Chiefly American English, widely understood elsewhere.
Origin
A boom is a long spar used to extend the foot of a sail; the English word, from Dutch boom meaning tree, pole or beam, is recorded from the 1640s in the long-pole sense and from the 1660s in the specific ship-spar sense (Etymonline, verified on its archived entry). The idiom itself has no Age-of-Sail pedigree: it is a twentieth-century colloquialism, and the earliest dated citation verifiable is the 1947 song Clancy Lowered the Boom by Hy Heath and Johnny Lange - verified on Wiktionary - popularized by Dennis Day on Jack Benny's radio program, released as a record in 1949 and reaching number 23 on the Billboard charts. No source fetched ties the phrase to any specific naval incident or practice: the nautical link is simply the spar and its force made figurative.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- lower the boom on someone
- lowering the boom
Usage Examples
- The school board lowered the boom on the students who vandalized the stadium, suspending them for the term.
- Regulators finally lowered the boom, fining the airline millions for the scheduling chaos.
- He had ignored his rivals for years, but when they mocked his family he lowered the boom.