Hey there, you have A Way with Words.
Thanks, so do you.
Thank you.
You’ve never heard that one before, never ever.
Not once.
And you don’t sound smug about it at all.
All right, who are you and what are you up to?
Hello, this is Michelle Smith, and I am from Williamsburg, Virginia.
And I have a question about the phrase, alley-oop.
My daughter, yeah, Ali, my daughter is two and a half and she’s got all these really fun language explosions.
And we do a lot of call and response in my house in general, which is that’s something my husband and I have done even before she was around.
But I like hoisting her up or, you know, putting a shirt on or, you know, probably like pulling up pants or throwing her in the car, whatever it is.
I’ll say Ali and then she’ll say, you know.
And it’s not the right version of the phrase, but it’s really cute.
Of course.
No, it comes from the French.
I mean, it’s used exactly the same way in French.
That allé part is spelled in French, A-L-L-E-Z, and it means go.
And they use it exactly like that in French.
You go allé, allé, allé.
And at soccer matches or football matches, the French, they’ll go,
Allé, allé, allé, allé, allé.
They’ll sing a song.
It means go, go, go to their team.
And then the oop part is spelled H-O-P or H-O-U-P.
But it looks like hop.
But it’s onomatopoeic.
It’s the noise that you might make.
It’s like when you lift something and there’s a little bit of force required to get up or jump up or hop up to just another level.
So it’s allé, oop, oop.
And it’s not the English word up, but it sounds like it.
So sometimes in English, people will spell it as UP, but it’s not the English word UP.
So, allé up, and we just borrowed it and spell it as OOP in English, allé up.
So it was a direct borrowed from French.
But there’s another complicated layer here, which you might love.
In French, they also say allé upla.
So the L-A at the end of that.
So it’s ale, A-L-L-E-Z, and then the word H-O-P, and then the word L-A.
And there’s a grove accent on the A.
And it means up there or over there.
There you go.
Something like that.
But that H-O-P-L-A became hoopla in English.
Oh, cool.
Yeah.
How about that?
Hopla became hoopla, meaning chaos or noise or confusion.
Yeah.
Because just imagine a bunch of people just like kind of like all trying together to like move a piano or something.
I think of an old black and white film where like these silly people are all together trying to make something happen.
And there’s a lot of hoopla and they’re all kind of like, oh, blah, oh, blah.
Each one telling the other to do it this way or that way.
Michelle, good for you for starting your child on a bilingual path there.
There you go. Right.
Now, I want you to tell us her name, and so we know when she calls us in a few years with the word question herself.
Listen, I almost planned it so she could be somewhere nearby so you could hear how cute it is.
Her name is Hazel.
Hazel. Okay, we expect to hear from Hazel.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah, we’ll make it happen.
Give her a squeeze for us, all right?
Okay, I sure will. Thanks so much.
Thanks, Michelle. Take care of yourself. Bye-bye.
Martha and I love to hear those stories about passing language along the family chain.
Email words@waywordradio.org.
