Hoosegow

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hello.

Hi, who’s this?

This is Bill Waters calling from Marquette, Michigan.

Well, Bill, welcome to the program.

Hi, Bill.

Good to have you.

Okay, I’m retired from the criminal justice system about 30-plus years in one venue or another, most recently as a criminal justice professor at Northern Michigan University here in Marquette.

And for most of that time, colleagues of the same generation as I were quite comfortable with the word hooskow as a place to lock the bad guys up.

It’s something that I first heard in almost every B-grade Western movie that I watched religiously growing up in the 40s and 50s.

Roy Rogers and Gene Autry were always referring to locking the bad guys up in the hoose-gow.

And I don’t hear it that much anymore, but it’s still part of my repertoire.

And I can’t imagine where that word comes from as a reference to a jail, lock-up, a prison.

So maybe you can help me.

Yeah, we should be able to help you.

Are you telling me, though, that your professional colleagues would use this, like, in front of judges or in their academic papers? That sort of thing?

No, no.

No, it would be over a beer at a conference or something like that.

That’s what I would expect.

Very good.

Like one dean or one president, university president or another, ought to be in the Hooskow.

Okay, gotcha.

They should all be in the Hooskow.

Yeah, we can definitely help on this.

Martha’s got the scoop, I’m sure.

Yeah, and I don’t know if you’ve seen it written out, but H-O-O-S-E-G-O-W?

Yeah, I wasn’t even sure how to spell it.

That sounds about right.

Yeah. Okay. Well, that’s how you’ll see it in English, but it will make infinite sense if you know that it comes from a Spanish word that means tribunal.

And the word is juzgado, which is J-U-Z-G-A-D-O, juzgado.

And it’s related, therefore, to words like judge and judgment and judicial.

It goes back to a Latin word that starts with a J.

And so we borrowed and adapted the Spanish juzgado into juzgal.

That happened a lot in the West.

In Spanish, they don’t pronounce the J as a j sound, right?

It’s more similar to an H.

Right.

Yeah, so it’s a place where people are judged, in other words.

So it was borrowed into English in the South and the Southwest from Spanish speakers, and we gave it our own spelling.

But it’s definitely slangy, right?

Oh, yeah.

Yeah, when you mentioned those Westerns, that’s exactly what I thought of.

I can see Roy and Trigger and his horse.

What was his horse’s name?

Oh, no, the dog was named Bullet, right?

The horse was Trigger.

The dog was Trigger.

Trigger was Roy’s horse, and Champion.

Champion was Gene’s.

Oh, very good.

It’s all coming back to me now.

But, yeah, he put all the bad guys in the hoose gal.

Well, that makes phenomenally good sense.

Listen, now I can use the word with a certain amount of certainty then that it isn’t just some drunk stumbling out of a Western bar then and making it up.

It might still be that, but go ahead.

Or maybe a fellow professor.

I don’t know.

Thanks for your call, Bill.

Much appreciated.

Pleasure.

Thank you.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Bye.

What do you use in your profession that’s kind of got you stumped? Something, a puzzle, that word that everyone says but nobody quite knows where it comes from?

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