The Buoys (or Bhoys) is the nickname for Celtic Football Club. Does anyone know the origin of this name?

My book spells it BHOYS but gives no explanation.

"'Bhoys' was a self-reference and nickname common among Irish emigrants referring to themselves.

The extra letter was an attempt to capture the Irish accent, as well as probably signifying a sense of their own cultural identity.

The term is said to have been generated in New York (USA) during the 19th Century and passed back over the Atlantic."


http://www.thecelticwiki.com/page/Bhoys

It maybe the question that is wrong.

Why are Celtic called the Bhoys? asks Dan Reid

'That's quite an old one', said Celtic's helpful press officer, who admitted he wasn't able to give a definitive answer to our question but would give it a good shot.

The first tangible bit of evidence the club have for their strange nickname is a postcard from the turn of the century which refers to the Celtic team of the time as 'the bould bhoys' (sic). It is thought the extra letter in 'boys' was added to phonetically represent the Irish pronunciation of the word, with a soft inflection of the h.

The writer of the postcard didn't coin the nickname as such ? the team were known to many as the 'bold boys' soon after the club was founded in 1888. But whoever the scribe was is widely credited with the unique spelling, and deserves the thanks of anyone who has had to write a back-page headline for a Glasgow newspaper in the past 100 years or so. Not to mention us.
http://football.guardian.co.uk/News_Story/0,1563,339997,00.html

The nickname is BHOYS and is spelt in this way to reflect a pronounciation from the Irish language.
In old gaelic language the letter 'b' was softened by using a bulcha or small dot over it. Because type writers could not type this letter, it was changed to 'bh' pronounced as 'v'. It would be a natural way to pronounce boys by Irish speakers.

To add to 1straybullet's point the term B'hoy and g'hal (meant to evoke an Irish pronunciation of boy and gal, respectively) were the prevailing slang words used to describe the young men and women of the rough-and-tumble working class culture of Lower Manhattan in the late 1840s and into the period of the American Civil War.
Allen, Robert C. (1991). Horrible Prettiness: Burlesque and American Culture. The University of North Carolina Press.
Courtesy of Wikipedia