As usual with historical word use on short words, you can and should check Google Ngram for the uses, and it seems to almost always be two things:
A proper name (in this case a type of monkey)
And
Bad OCR for the word “both” or “brufh” (which seems to be related to “buffing” or some kind of cleaning, from context?)
You get the same for frequent use of “fuck” which is almost always “suck” written with a long s.
Could “brufh” be “brush”? I know English languages used to use the long S, which looks like an F, and could be related to buffing?
E: oh sorry just finished reading your comment and you mentioned the long S already 😅
really? my top google result was that it was used as an abbreviation for brother as a prefix like when referring to a monk
Never actually looked into this, though I did assume majority of these kinds of posts were some kind of bullshit. Thanks for the specifics!
In this case, I believe it’s “Bruh” as an alternative spelling of “Br’er”
According to a little googling. The bruh spike in the 1850s was most likely just because of a single book that taxonomized an animal as a “bruh” and the spike is significant only because the word isn’t popular at any point in time.
Our use of “bruh” probably came around the 1890s.
Bruh
google says it was likely being used as an abbreviation for brother when somebody carried it as a title, like a friar
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