Origin of “Hang a Roscoe”

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Dan, and I’m calling from Los Angeles.

Hi, Dan. Welcome. What’s on your mind?

Thank you so much.

So the other day I was in the car with my friend Corey, and a little backstory.

Corey is from Salt Lake City, Utah, and I’m from a really small town in upstate New York.

And Corey was giving me directions, and we came to a stoplight, and he said,

Okay, he’s like, at the light, go ahead and hang a Roscoe.

And I said, a what?

He said, hang a Roscoe.

And I was like, no, you mean hang a Ralph.

I don’t know who Roscoe is.

And he’s like, well, I don’t know who Ralph is.

We agree on Louie.

When you take a left, it’s hang a Louie.

We, you know, we’re universal on that, I guess.

But we are wondering who are Ralph and Roscoe and why the difference.

Do you ever bang a Roscoe or bang a Ralph?

No, you bang a Yui.

You bang a Yui.

You don’t hang a Yui.

You know, but never bang a Louie or a Ralph.

What do you do, Martha?

Do you hang a right?

I just turn right.

I hang a right.

You turn right.

You don’t even hang a right.

I let the Google lady tell me now.

Dan, do you ever bust a Yui?

No, I’ve never bust a Yui.

You never bust a Yui.

No.

Okay.

There’s so many of these.

There’s so many of these.

And it’s funny how many of them have to do with names.

I think there’s, I only know Louis for left.

And as far as I’ve ever seen in the slang dictionaries,

That’s the only one that I know.

And inevitably we’ll get a call or an email from somebody saying,

We in our town, we use something else.

Hang a Leon.

Hang a Loran.

I don’t know.

I did a quick Google search, and the only thing, I couldn’t really find anything on the history,

But people also say hang a Reggie, and I just think that’s too far.

I can’t.

Well, some people do hang a Rachel and a Roger or a Rochester.

There’s a few of these.

Yeah.

Do you ever whip a Yui, chuck a Yui?

There’s a ton of these.

No.

But, you know, we do have an example in the slang dictionaries.

I say the slang dictionaries because they all basically have the same citation.

So in the New Partridge Dictionary of Slang in Unconventional English and in the Historical Dictionary of American Slang and a couple other places, they have Hangar Roscoe from 1966.

So we at least know that it goes back to the 1960s.

I would not be surprised if it’s a lot older.

Why we insist on coming up with these names for the turns, we don’t really know.

There are a number of places in American slang where we do suggest, like to Ralph, it means vomit is kind of a name, although it might be onomatopoeic.

There’s a few places where we do take names for things for some unknown reason.

But also it kind of echoes the military assignment of names to the alphabet in order that they may have clarity over the radio.

But we’re not 100 percent sure why there are names for this, why people use Roscoe and Ralph and so forth.

And have you in your research, did you find anything about regional?

Like, is it am I more likely to hear Ralph in the northeast and Roscoe in the west?

Nothing convincing.

I know that there are people who will, with great confidence, will chime in on a conversation thread and everyone in Miami says whatever, you know, Roger, Hanger Roger.

But then there’ll be somebody else who will chime in a couple of comments later going like, I’m from Miami.

I’ve lived here my whole life.

Nobody in my family says that.

So there’s no convincing evidence.

Although I suspect that if somebody were to give me a very large grant to do the research to figure this out over the next three years, I could do the research.

You’d put me right out of the studio, wouldn’t you?

Yeah, I could find something regional about it.

So, yeah.

Well, awesome.

Thank you guys so much.

Sure.

No problem.

I know we’re going to get a ton of calls.

There’s a couple more that people say for different U-turns and stuff.

We’ll just turn on the phone and let everybody call us and tell us what they say for a U-turn, a right turn, and a left turn.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Thanks, Dan.

I’m looking forward to hearing those.

Yeah, me too.

Thanks so much.

Okay.

Thanks, Dan.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

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