Boom, boom, boom

Boom could be declared the word of the month. While BP tries to contain the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico with oil absorbent booms, whose polypropylene filler absorbs the oil but not water, the governor of Arizona
signed a law that supposedly will curb illegal immigration like a boom stretched across an entrance point, for example of a parking structure, to block access through a control point.
Of course, a boom can also mean a state of economic prosperity, a sudden opportunity to make money, in other words just what investors would prefer to the recent slump on Wall Street. Thus, May could be defined as a month of anit-boom.
According to the OED, the origin of boom meaning economic prosperity is unclear but may be related to the onomatopoetic word boom, describing a deep, loud, resonant sound as of thunder or “a distant cannon,” although an economic boom does refer “not so much to the sound as to the suddenness and rush with which it is accompanied.”
Since the OED also offers a definition of boom as “the effective launching of anything with éclat…upon public attention,” Professor George Rekers may painfully experience a twofold boom right now, the public attention to his private preferences and their inconsistency with his public teachings as well as the resonant sound of laughter at his assertion that he only shared with his travel assistant "the gospel of Jesus Christ … in three extended conversations.” Not only has Rekers' crusade against the gay community backfired with a loud boom, but his attempt to define his travel companion as a mere pageboy - or a boom, “part of equipment [such as a crane] that loads and unloads things,” has boomeranged on him.
And finally, in the NYT there is the debate over the boomer generation, born between 1946 and 1964 at a time of rapid growth in population, whom Thomas Friedman in “Root Canal Politics” accuses to have eaten like locusts through the abundance their parents had created. Yet, according to Leonard Steinhorn, one boomer, Bill Clinton, "embraced boomers" and left office having accumulated a surplus, which another boomer, Georg W., squandered, proudly declaring himself an anti-boomer.