What it means
Means brilliant, really good, spot on. You’ll hear it round Brum and the wider Black Country when something hits just right, from a curry to a cracking bit of banter. Often said as bostin’ without the G, and it likely comes from bursting, like something’s so good it’s ready to burst. Say it with pride and a grin. Dead simple, dead flattering.
Usage examples
"That balti we smashed last night was proper bostin, bab. Get us back to Ladypool Road this weekend and I’m ordering the same again."
"That curry was bostin, mate, best balti I've had in ages, we're coming back next Friday for definite."
"Fair play, the lad did a bostin job on the garden fence, looks brand new and held up in the storm."
Where it comes from
From the older British dialect bursting (about to burst with goodness, full to the brim), attested in the West Midlands speech of the Black Country and Birmingham since the eighteenth century, with the characteristic dropping of the final consonant cluster typical of the regional dialect. The form bostin crystallized in working-class Birmingham and Black Country speech of the nineteenth century as the universal positive adjective for anything exceptionally good, from the curry at the Ladypool Road balti house to the result of the Aston Villa match at Villa Park, and survives intact today as one of the most recognizable identity markers of West Midlands English in the songs of the Streets and the football chants of the Hawthorns terrace.
Other ways to say it
Editors of this term
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