Hoopie

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hello, Martha. This is Wayne from Palm City, Florida.

Well, hi, Wayne. From where?

Palm City, Florida.

Palm City on the Atlantic Coast, right?

On the Atlantic Coast, about 45 miles north of West Palm Beach.

Gotcha. Well, welcome to the show. What can we do for you?

Hi, Wayne. What’s going on?

Hi, Grant. How are you?

All right.

I have a word that I used when I was a child or in my early teens or it was used around me. The word is hoopy.

Hoopy?

Hoopie. The definition, I guess, would be white trash, because my dad would say, tuck your shirt tail in, and you look like a hoopie.

Huh.

Interesting stuff. And so you’ve got to tell us where you and your father are from.

We’re from northeastern Ohio, Alliance, Ohio. It’s about 60 miles south of Cleveland.

Okay. This fits. This fits the pattern.

It’s really interesting stuff, because in the Dictionary of American Regional English, under the entry for Hoopie, all of the citations except one come from Ohio. This is a very Ohio word, and it’s got a cool history.

I don’t suppose you know very much about barrel making?

Barrel making?

Barrel making.

I’m an HG fan or a Discovery fan, so I’ve seen barrels being made.

Okay. Well, there’s this history of in the Ohio River Valley, when the Ohio River was the way to get east and west in that part of the country. We’re talking pre-airplane, pre-highway, right?

There was a culture of pottery making and a culture of barrel making. And there was all this commerce associated with the river where these folks would come from the hills, usually West Virginia, but also the rural parts of Ohio. And they would cluster around these river towns.

And they were hired to do the lowest, meanest work possible. And a lot of times this had something to do with barrels or barrel making.

For example, the businesses that made lots of pots or china or crockery, that sort of thing, would use barrels packed with straw in order to ship their stuff. And somebody had to hammer down the barrel hoops to hold the staves together so this stuff could be shipped.

Think about the cardboard box today. The barrels were the cardboard box of their day. That’s how you ship stuff. At least during this period in that place.

That’s interesting because my father was from Sebring, Ohio, which is like a town of 6,000 people, and their main industry was pottery. I’m not surprised that the industry is still there.

And so there kind of became an us versus them division where these people from the rural parts of West Virginia and Ohio would come to what seemed to be the big town, and they were looked down upon. They were seen as rubes or hicks or hillbillies.

And so they were hoopies because they worked with these hoops on barrels. I mean, it’s low manual labor. You’re just hammering away. Or even you might have a long pole across your shoulders with all these hoops on it, and you would walk from, you know, you would go to Rivertown after Rivertown trying to sell these hoops that you’d made. Just the basest, lowest work.

And so it’s very much a derogatory term. And it reminds me of the term Hoosier, and not the term Hoosier for somebody from Indiana, but the term Hoosier as we use it in St. Louis. Where I’m from, which is Hoosier there, it means exactly the same thing. It’s always somebody from somewhere else who we think is a rube or a hick.

Same in North Carolina.

Well, that’s interesting, too, because I have kin from West Virginia, so.

Oh, are they hoopies?

Are they hoopies or hoogers?

I heard mountain hoogers.

Hoogers.

Oh, that’s a good one. That’s a good one.

So are your relatives hoopies?

No, no, we wouldn’t say that. Using the word hoopie, you use it more through a window than a mirror.

Oh.

So anybody else would be a hoopie, but you wouldn’t look like a hoopie.

I love that. That’s fantastic. We are writing that down. More through a window than through a mirror. Beautiful. Wow. Well put. That’s great.

Wayne, I hope we helped you some.

Thank you very much. It’s been very informative.

Our pleasure.

Thank you, Wayne.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Thank you.

Bye now.

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