boomsayer
(BOOM.say.ur)
n.
A person who predicts boom times and good news. Also: boom-sayer, boom sayer.
Example Citation:
"The State of Humanity" is a ringing chorus of good tidings...Thus the volume, tough going in places because of an eye-glazing number of charts and statistics, is the boomsayer's answer to the omnipresent doomsayers, who, Simon says, have been wrong in all of their bleak forecasts for the past 30 years.
—Bob Fishburn, "Experts Say the World Is Getting Better and Better," Roanoke Times & World News, April 7, 1996
Earliest Citation:
Shoppers don't believe it, but we are entering a period of stable prices and rising employment. That word comes down from Sinai — Allen Sinai, 44, senior economist for Data Resources, the largest private forecasting firm in the country. "We're going to have five or six years of relatively low inflation, averaging less than 5%," he asserts.
—Greg Anrig Jr., "The boomsayer," Money, May 1983
Notes:
The word is a play on doomsayer, a term that entered the language around 1961.
