Hoosier

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hello there.

Hello, who’s this?

Jane Sislucis, calling from Marquette, Michigan.

Jane!

Yes.

Hi, welcome.

Thank you.

What’s up? What can we do for you?

Okay. Well, Grant, I understand you grew up in Missouri, but I don’t know where you grew up.

I was born in St. Louis and lived all over the state, southeast, middle, eastern side mostly.

Gotcha. I grew up in St. Louis.

Okay, great.

Even though I haven’t lived at home since I was about 18, I visit frequently.

And I was listening a couple weeks ago, and this prompted the call was about what you call outsiders in your town.

And it made me think about growing up with the word Hoosiers, because I know there’s a whole state of Hoosiers over in Indiana, and they’re proud of the fact.

But growing up in St. Louis, it was actually a put-down, kind of white trash, kind of redneck.

I’m not happy to say that that’s what it is, but I know it still exists, because I do talk to my family and I go there.

I could never understand as a kid when I had the realization that Hoosiers was a good thing somewhere else, a bad thing where I lived.

So, what can you tell me?

Well, quite a bit, actually.

My father has Hoosier in his speech, just as you do.

For him, it is somebody who is uncouth or uncultured.

It might be the kind of fellow who leaves his gum under a handrail or goes wading in decorative fountains or wears sweatpants on his head when he can’t find a hat, that kind of person.

Just really not, you know, thinking about the way they present themselves to the rest of the world.

That’s a Hoosier?

Yeah, in my father’s.

But it’s got a really long history.

And the original origins of Hoosier are indistinct.

There are a lot of theories that are proposed.

I know we’ll get email from lots of listeners in Indiana about this.

But none of them have good solid basis in fact, so we won’t go into them here.

But we do know that at some point, once Hoosier got fairly well established, you’ve got to remember migration patterns.

There was people traveling down the Ohio River and ending up in St. Louis.

And St. Louis is a linguistic mutt.

It’s a strange thing to look at the language map of the United States that illustrates the dialects.

And to see that St. Louis is surrounded by patches of dialect that are different from St. Louis itself.

It’s about the 60 to 100 mile radius.

But it’s got a spur of dialect influence that you can literally see on the map that goes up Highway 55 to Chicago.

So St. Louis has remnants of its German heritage.

It has remnants of being a river town of people coming up the Mississippi, especially when African-Americans started coming north.

It has remnants of being a huge city.

You know, 100 plus years ago, St. Louis was one of the major cities in the United States.

It’s got all these weird kind of heritages.

Plus, stuff is kind of stuck there because it’s its own self.

I won’t say it’s insular, but St. Louis doesn’t often look to the outside world for influence except for Chicago.

So anyway, point being that Hoosiers are stuck there and they mean it to mean, just as you say, a redneck or someone who’s not from the city, someone from the country who doesn’t know how to behave and doesn’t have manners.

It also means that in North Carolina, in the Smoky Mountains.

Yeah, Hoosier with a small H.

It’s more like a Hoosier, though, right?

There’s hooger, there’s, yeah, with D-G-E-R and J-E-R.

The Dictionary of Smoky Mountain English has a reference to a feller who don’t know nothing except what they learned in the mountains.

In town, they speak of a country hooger or a mountain hooger.

Here in North Carolina, they speak of Tennessee hoogers.

In Tennessee, they speak of North Carolina hoogers.

Interesting.

So, yeah, they brought that over to the area you’re talking about.

Right.

Well, I know that it still exists very strongly.

My sister told me recently that there’s a term I never heard.

If you live on one end of Broadway in St. Louis versus the other end, you might be called a hoogerois.

Is that?

An upscale hoosier.

Never heard of that one.

I like that.

Nor have I.

The hoogeroisie, right.

But you are right to say that people who live in Indiana take it as a point of pride.

Hoosier is not a derogatory term as far as they’re concerned.

Absolutely.

It was, at one time, almost completely a derogatory term.

They just took it and owned it.

Okay.

Very good.

Thanks for calling.

I really appreciate it, Jane.

Thank you.

Take care.

Bye-bye.

We got a ton of email when we asked you what you call people who are from away or from out of town or not from, you know, who weren’t local.

If you’ve got more of that, we’d love to hear it.

877-929-9673.

Or email us, words@waywordradio.org.