Origin of Hoodlum

Hi, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Angela.

Hiya, Angela. Where are you calling from?

I’m calling from Wolcott, Vermont.

Wolcott, Vermont.

Welcome to the show, Angela. How can we help?

Well, I have been wondering for the past couple of years, periodically, where the word hoodlum came from.

Hoodlum as in like a thug or bad guy?

Yeah, I mean, I guess I was kind of thinking that it was more of like kind of kids that would cause trouble. And I remember this came up when I was in college. And it’s something that I’ve never looked up on my own before, surprisingly. And it’s come up periodically over the past couple of years. So, yeah, I was thinking it was like kids that would kind of go around and cause trouble. Or, yeah, I guess someone, anyone that would really cause trouble.

So we have a couple of different things happening here. We’ve got hood, which is short for hoodlum. And they both mean the same thing. They refer to a bad guy or a thug or a troublemaker. And then we’ve got hood, like the thing that you wear on your head. It comes from some Germanic words, probably Dutch, meaning hat. And we know that’s a very clear, perfectly traced etymological path. We know that’s true.

The question that we have is where hoodlum itself comes from. It pops up in the western part of the United States in the 1870s in San Francisco and is literally from day one used to refer to exactly the same kind of people it refers to now, these guys who are up to no good, just troublemakers, almost always a man, somebody maybe either actually breaking the law or threatening to break the law or somehow disturbing the peace.

Where it gets murky is that the word popped up with such ferocity. I mean, it just suddenly pops up in all the periodicals and journals of the day and starts to be talked about and used coast to coast because the newspapers all borrowed from each other. And everybody came up with these wild theories. It came from Swedish. It came from German. It came from this. It came from that. And everybody’s sure that they’re absolutely right.

So even today, when you look at dictionaries, some of them just say, origin unknown. And some of them say, oh, Swedish, it comes from the Swedish word meaning disorderly. And some will say it’s German. It comes from a German word meaning ragged, good for nothing. But the problem with these supposed Swedish and German origins is that we don’t actually have strong Swedish or German communities in the places where this word first appeared. It just wasn’t a community there that would actually make this word stick. And it’s weird that it just pops up.

Yeah.

Yeah, it was super slangy.

Oh, that is so funny because, you know, I’ve never tried to Google it, which is surprising because I Google everything on my phone. But that’s really bizarre. I wouldn’t have been able to find anything anyway.

If you want something to Google, if your Google foo is unstoppable, as they say, Google hoodlum and the words notes and queries. There’s this famous journal that’s existed for a million years where people would, scientists and thinkers and philosophers of the previous age would write to each other and post their queries in this journal. And then other people would reply in the next issue. And so there’s tons of speculation in notes and queries about hoodlum. I mean, these are all armchair linguists, all armchair etymologists, all of them absolutely sure that they’re completely correct and everyone else is wrong, just in that way that people can be. So that would be a lot of fun reading for you.

It sounds like old-fashioned Twitter.

Yeah.

You know, it’s funny. It reminds me very much of it. And it’s all white dudes. It’s all, you know, it’s all old, educated white dudes. And so, you know, just used to being right in their universe, everyone letting them pretend that they’re right. And so they are convinced that they still are right about everything else, that if it just occurs to them, it must be true.

Well, that could be amusing reading.

Yeah, a little bit. Thank you so much for trying to answer my question.

Sure, Angela. Easy peasy. Thank you for calling.

Okay, thank you very much.

Okay, bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Yeah, sometimes the search is as much fun as finding the answer, right?

Right.

And, you know, the truth is, as much as I belittle the armchair linguists, occasionally they get it right. And what etymologists do is they gather all of these theories, every single one, and one by one they try to prove them right or prove them wrong. Actually, they do both. They prove them wrong and right. And at the end of all their study and all their research, then they come up with the most likely theory, and that’s what gets printed in the dictionary.

Well, if there’s a word that’s caught your ear, call us, 877-929-9673. And if you’re curious about the origin of a word or phrase, you can always email us. That address is words@waywordradio.org. Or you can find us on Facebook and Twitter.