The grandmother of a woman in Council Bluffs, Iowa, says tousled hair looks like a hoorah’s nest. Also spelled hurrah’s nest or hooraw’s nest, this means “an untidy mess” or “a commotion.” Its origin is uncertain. In 1829, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow described someone as having a head like a hurra’s nest. The term’s origin is obscure, although it might have to do with the nest of an imaginary creature. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Hurrah’s Nest”
Hello, welcome to A Way with Words.
Hi, my name is Sarah and I’m from Council Bluffs, Iowa.
Hello, Sarah. Welcome to the show.
What’s up?
Hi, thank you.
My grandmother has a saying, I’ve heard this all of my life, and she said she got it from her grandmother. This dates back quite a ways as her grandmother was a young bride during the Civil War. Whenever her hairdo is messed up, either she needs a perm or it’s been really windy, she would say that her hair looked like a hoo-rah’s nest. And she can’t tell me what that means. She never thought to ask her grandmother before she passed away. And no one in our family has any idea what she’s talking about.
Looked like a hoo-rah’s nest.
Yes.
And that doesn’t sound very complimentary, right?
No, it does not.
Yeah. And so where were your relatives from?
During the Civil War, they lived here in the Council Bluffs, Iowa, and down to Manhattan, Kansas. And prior to the Civil War, they resided from Pennsylvania, watching those, the Pennsylvania Dutch.
Okay.
Very interesting.
Yeah, we’ve seen variations of this, like hurrah’s nest, H-U-R-R-A-H, hurrah’s nest, or hurrah’s nest. And it’s mainly sort of down the eastern seaboard, New Jersey, Maryland, D.C., North Carolina, Georgia, and Florida. And we don’t really know what a hurrah is.
I would guess it would be some kind of bird. Right? But I mean, did you have an image of anything in your head when they said this?
Pretty much pictured a bird’s nest on top of her head. Sometimes when she was desperately needing a perm, her hair is pretty wiry. It kind of resembled a nest.
Yeah. Well, that’s great. Well, it has a long tradition. I mean, it goes back a couple hundred years. I found it as early as 1817.
There you go. There you go. And actually, yeah. And Henry Wadsworth Longfellow actually used it in his journals when he was talking about a queer-looking Dutchman with a head like a hoora’s nest. And he had it in quotes.
So we are guessing that it’s earlier than his journals.
Yeah, usually when people call a word out with quotes, it means that they’re either they recognize it as an exceptional term.
Well, that’ll please my grandmother if she’s been quoting Longfellow.
Yeah.
Yeah, he used it in 1829 in his journals that were published by his brother after he died.
Okay, well that would be about the time my great-great-grandmother would have been a young woman, so that makes sense.
Yeah, and you can use it for things besides hair. I mean, you know, if you have a teenager with a room. Or even a situation can be a hoo-rah’s house.
Right, right, just a jumble of things.
Oh, okay.
We just don’t know who the hoo-rah was or is.
No, mythological bird maybe, something out of… Because a lot of the early uses of this are seafarers, right?
Yeah, right.
There’s one particular definition given in some dictionaries which says something about a tangle of debris blocking a path or something like that.
Right, or like ropes on the deck, something like that.
Oh, okay.
Yeah.
Huh.
Well, that’s really interesting.
Thank you.
Our pleasure.
Thanks for calling, Sarah.
Bye.
Hoorah.
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First thing that came to mind when listening to this discussion was Texas Ranger La Boeuf’s retort to Rooster Cogburn in “True Grit”: “You’ve been hoorah-ed by a little girl!”