Hornicaboogery

Hello, you have A Way with Words. Hi, this is Tracy, and I’m calling. I have a question for you.

My mother is from West Virginia, and I don’t know whether she has made up words her whole life, or whether it’s she uses colloquialisms. And my son, who’s 18, we were driving down the road the other day listening to your show, which we enjoy. Thank you very much. And he said, you need to call in and ask. So I wanted to ask you about the word hornicabuggery. What is hornicabuggery?

Hornicabuggery is germs, basically. Cooties are germs. And when I asked my husband whether it was cooties or germs, he said it’s germs because cooties have faces and germs don’t.

But I guess in a sentence, I would say something like, oh, you know, don’t play with that kid over there with the snot running down his face. He’s got the horn of boogery.

Oh, okay.

Gotcha.

So this is kind of just a generic term for any kind of random illness you can’t identify that looks contagious.

Yes.

Yeah.

And spell that for us.

I have no idea how to spell it.

I mean, the horn part I could get in there and boogery. But the nika part, I don’t know.

Hornika booger.

And I don’t know if my mom, if that’s something she would have made up. But she said it was her family has just always used it.

Wow.

For it’s kind of the creeping crud.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Okay.

We’re going to add that to our collection then because.

Yeah, there’s a whole bunch of terms for these random names for illnesses you can’t identify.

Yeah.

Gollywobbles, lupus, stupus, lopsilos.

I like pantos.

So you’ve never heard this one?

Not this one, no.

No, the Dictionary of American Regional English has a whole long list of these, but that one is not in there.

I like pantod on the rummet.

I don’t know what that means.

I like the can’t help it’s.

The can’t help it’s.

Or the school bus cramps, I like that one.

Or the Carly Marbles or the Collywobbles.

The school bus cramps, that’s what you claim to have when you don’t want to go to school.

Exactly.

Or you don’t want to do your homework when coming home from school.

Right. Either way. But yeah, that’s a new one on me.

Hornica boogery.

We just always had the hornica boogery.

Well, I’ll tell you what, Tracy, we’re going to put the word out. Anybody who knows this term will surely email us or call us. And if we find out more, we’ll talk about it on the air, all right?

That’s great.

Okay.

Thank you for calling.

Thanks. It’s a good one. It works.

It’s outstanding. It’s fun to say.

I’m going to adopt it. Thank you.

And it also sounds like it has booger in there somehow.

Well, you have a great day. Thanks for the show. We really enjoy it.

Okay. Stay healthy. Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

There’s a ton of these.

Oh, yeah.

Some of them are based on real words like epizootics is connected to a horse disease.

Yep.

But kind of generically it just means he’s got the crud.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I like collywobbles.

Yeah.

Me too.

But I do like hornicabuggery.

Collywobbles works on both sides of the Atlantic.

And sometimes it just means like the heebie-jeebies or the willies where you kind of got like you’re kind of creeped out or freaked out, not necessarily ill.

I think of it as a stomach thing.

Well, do you have a family word that you’d like to share with us?

Give us a call, 877-929-9673.