A hootenanny, commonly thought of as a party in Appalachia, is also a term for German pancakes. But when you look in the Dictionary of American Regional English, you’ll notice that hootenanny is synonymous with doohickey or thingamajig, and can refer to, among other things, a sleigh, something to sharpen shears, or an imaginary object. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “The Many Meanings of Hootenanny”
Hello, you have A Way with Words.
Hello, this is Thane from Bridger Valley, Wyoming.
Hi, Thane. Welcome to the show.
Oh, thank you.
Thanks for having me.
What can we do for you?
I have a little bit of a story and then a question.
Great.
I grew up on a horse ranch here in southwestern Wyoming, and we always were taught that we have to feed the animals before we feed ourselves.
But the problem was Christmas morning.
As kids, we wanted to get up and open all the presents, and so it was really hard to either go out and do chores or wait for Dad to finish the chores.
So my mother made a kind of German pancake.
It took about a half hour to make, and it included the blender, and we would eat that with syrup on Christmas morning, and she called it Hootenanny.
She got both the recipe and the name from her mother, who is a Dutch-Irish homesteader out here.
And I thought it was Hootenanny until I went to college in New York City.
And everyone says, Hootenanny, that’s a party in Appalachia.
So I guess my question is twofold.
Is that original for here?
Is my family the only one that uses hootenanny for a German pancake?
Where does the phrase hootenanny come from, meaning a party?
And for that matter, why is a hoot a good time?
Okay.
It’s not called a humminanny, right?
You’ve got to holler.
That’s right.
It’s not a whole humminanny.
That’s right.
That’s right.
Now, you said a German pancake.
What do you mean by that?
It’s like the recipe for German pancakes.
You take six eggs, some flour, and you put a whole bunch of butter, which is not normal in German pancakes.
And you bake it for 30 minutes, and it fluffs up really big, almost like an egg casserole, and then you eat it with syrup.
Okay.
Okay, this is really good.
You’re not alone.
There are other recipes for Hootenanny pancakes out there.
You can do a search on Google Books and you’ll find at least four recipes for Hootenanny pancakes.
What’s interesting is that they’re not all pancakes.
Like you say, some of them are casserole dishes.
It’s basically the same as a pancake recipe with a lot of butter and a lot of eggs.
All of the recipes call for six eggs, which as far as I’m concerned is a lot of eggs for pancakes.
I was going to say, it sounds like a big production.
Is that why it’s called a Hootenanny?
Well, there’s a really interesting thing about the word Hootenanny.
The thing, it hasn’t always just been these pancakes, which is pretty rare usage, nor the big party that you would have in Appalachia.
It has meant just a thingamajig.
It has been like a kind of placeholder word for a lot of different things.
And I think it’s kind of just been borrowed here and there, like you might borrow doohickey or thingamajig just to refer to a thing that doesn’t have a name, right?
So in the Dictionary of American Regional English, they talk about it as a kind of sleigh.
They talk about something to sharpen shears.
They talk about it as an imaginary object, certain other kinds of tools, something insignificant or nonsense, and the party.
So Hootenanny has been a lot of different things.
And we’ll find that again and again throughout the slangy words of English where a word will take quite a while to fix its meaning.
And when it does get fixed, sometimes it’s used for more than one thing.
And here we are.
It’s pancakes or it’s a party.
Or both.
Pancakes at a party.
Yeah, I was going to say.
Thanks so much for giving us a call.
Thanks for calling.
No problem.
Thank you.
Take care.
Bye-bye.
Bye-bye.
