Origins of the Word “Hooligan”

Hello, you have A Way with Words. Hi, this is Jill from Indianapolis. Hey, Jill, what’s on your mind?

Well, I had a question about a word that I heard, I believe it was on NPR, that the word hooligan is considered racist. And so I looked it up and all I could find was that there’s a connotation with the Irish or with football fans. And I asked around to some friends and they thought the same, but we didn’t find anything that implied that it maybe had more contemporary racist connotations.

Do you remember the context of the show that you first heard it on?

I don’t remember. I just remember hearing, oh, words that people don’t know that they’re using are racist like hooligan. And I immediately sort of alarm went off like, oh, no, have I been using that word? Just because I’d never associated it with anything derogatory and usually just with sort of like unruly children, maybe.

Oh, yeah.

This is a complicated topic. We often encounter this. We get sent emails asking us to fact check a list of possibly racist terms. They come up on our Facebook group. People call us on the phone to ask about this. We get asked to be interviewed for radio and newspapers about this. Who again is sometimes on the list? And the problem with so many of these terms is it’s about context and perspective. Your definition of racist might not be my definition of racist. And your sensitivity might be different than my sensitivity. And your understanding of history might be different than mine. And you’re willing to accept some historical data might be stricter than mine or broader than mine.

So that all said, we can talk about hooligan, but I want you to keep that all in mind, okay?

Mm—

So possibly a slur against the Irish. That’s what we’re investigating here.

Yeah, yeah. My overall thesis is that it wasn’t originally and that it isn’t now, but it could have been used in racist ways over the century that it’s been around. So that’s the important part. Any word can be turned to malevolent purpose. As a matter of fact, there’s new information that I uncovered myself, and none of the reference works I have have this information, is that it probably came out of London, not the United States as most reference works have it.

In the mid-1890s, there was a hooligan gang operating in South London. They were called The Hooligan Gang, capital H, capital G. They had a lot of ruffians. They were accosting people, stealing money, all the usual crimes. There were other gangs operating at the same time, the Wyatt gang, the Girdle gang, G-I-R-D-L-E. But the hooligan gang caught on and they had some success and kept being talked about in the newspapers. And by 1898, the word hooliganism appeared and was talked about both in the United Kingdom and in the United States.

So this idea of hooliganism and hooligans spread to the new world. And so by the end of the 1890s, you can find in both the United Kingdom and on the East Coast of the United States much talk of hooligans and hooliganism and what they’re doing. And it’s in exactly the same language. Sometimes they talked about hoolies gang in exactly the same language. And it’s pretty clear that there’s some confusion about whether or not hooligans and hoolies gang are the same thing.

I believe that they’re exactly the same thing, although there’s one story that kept being repeated over and over that they were different people and different things. But the information is muddled, and at 100 years it’s hard to tell whether or not that’s true. And Hooligan, by the way, was an incredibly common name. I mean, so common. And variations on O Hooligan and Houlihan, they’re all variations on the same name. So it’s impossible to say who Hooligan was, which person it was named for. Sometimes people say it was a Patrick Hooligan, but we don’t know. And there were a lot of Patrick Hooligans. I mean, Patrick Hooligan was almost like John Smith, incredibly common name. So we don’t really know.

But in any case, it’s a hundred-year-old world. Where in the beginning it was an actual criminal gang. So if there was something negative about it, it’s because they were up to criminal deeds. So if I were to use it to describe a group of kids running around the neighborhood and calling them hooligans, somebody overhearing me wouldn’t necessarily think that I was using a slur unless that group was a particular subset of people who might be perceived as that I was speaking ill of them.

Yeah, maybe. I would say that you can’t count on everyone knowing everything that you know, right? So if you called a group of Irish-American kids Julian, somebody might take offense.

Right, right. So your question is, do I stop using the word or not?

Yeah, I think my main concern was that if I had used the word, that I would be perceived by the general public as using a slur, whereas I had never heard that before. And so I just wanted to make sure that I wasn’t living in a bubble where I was using the word hooligan and everyone else was saying, I can’t believe she just used that word.

No, there’s something called amelioration, and that’s what’s happened to hooligan. It is definitely ameliorated where it’s much blander and bleached of a lot of its negative meaning. It’s very much the kind of word that you might use on kids these days, at least in this country. It’s a different thing in the United Kingdom. But, of course, we’re different English speakers. We have two different Englishes going on. But it’s not specifically an anti-Irish.

No, it isn’t. Not in this country, it isn’t. Not at all.

Okay. Well, that’s good to know. Thank you for your thoughtful question. Really appreciate it.

Great. Thank you so much.

All right. Take care.

Take care, Jill. Bye-bye.

Bye. Take care.

Well, have you been having conversations online with your friends about this or that word? Call us about it, 877-929-9673, or send it to us in email. The address is words@waywordradio.org.