Alley-Oop

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Sabrina from Oceanside, California.

Hiya, Sabrina.

Hello, Sabrina.

How you doing?

Good, what’s on your mind?

Well, I had a question regarding Alley Oop. I was reading the funnies and for some reason it prompted my memory that there was an old cartoon about a caveman called Alley Oop.

Right.

Yeah, it’s still in some newspapers, actually.

Is it? I didn’t know that.

Yeah, so I was just verifying that with my mom, and then I also knew that alley-oop is a basketball shot, and I just wondered about if there was any relationship or how one became the other.

Sabrina, are you a basketball fan?

No, I’m not. I’m a football fan.

Oh, a football fan. I was just going to say that I’m a basketball fan, and there’s nothing more beautiful than an alley-oop. It’s poetry.

Correct me if I’m wrong, an alley-oop is when I’m running for the basket and you’re coming along behind me with the ball and I leap up and you throw the ball in such a way that I catch it in the air and then I slam it down into the net, right?

Yes, you are up above the rim and when you see that, it is poetry.

It is like hitting the sweet spot on a tennis racket. There’s just nothing like it.

I love alley-oops.

I can’t do them anymore.

There used to be an alley-oop in football, though, didn’t there?

I think, yeah.

So is the alley-oop the long pass, or is it the jumping up and dunking?

Sabrina, is that a Hail Mary?

What’s a Hail Mary?

It’s more like good luck with who gets it.

Oh, I got you.

And the alley-oop is more precise in basketball.

So anyway, back to your question.

Yeah, the comic, Hamlin, I think is the guy’s name, who drew that for years and years and years.

I think there’s a connection here.

What I can tell you about alley-oop, first of all, though, it comes from the French, and it basically means get up or go.

Because allé, A-L-L-E-Z in French, is the imperative command for go, or get with it to move on, to get cracking.

Kind of the quint of bouger-vous, move yourself, get moving.

And then the up part, or our oop part, comes from, and this is where some of the dictionaries actually, they need a chastisement for me.

It comes from H-O-P, ope. It sounds like ope in French because you don’t pronounce the H.

So, alléoup, alléoup, like that.

So, it sounds like up.

So, sometimes you’ll find alléoup written as alléup in English.

Some of the dictionaries, they actually spell it as O-U-P or H-O-U-P, but none of my French dictionaries have that.

Anyway, they use it in acrobatics, and they have since the 1920s, Sabrina.

Yeah.

So, I think there’s a physical connection between the physical effort of the kind of acrobatic world, and maybe there’s something happening there.

I don’t know how we would get into football and basketball and so forth, but more than likely, I’m suspecting that our soldiers brought it back from France.

We can tell you a lot about Aléup as a word, but we can’t tell you about a connection to sports.

Okay. Well, that helps.

It does?

A little bit.

I mean, it’s good to know about the history of it.

As far as the connection goes, we’ll just have to see.

Well, thanks for calling, Sabrina.

Thank you for your time.

Thank you, Sabrina. Bye-bye.

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