When a Hoosier Isn’t From Indiana

Hey there, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Mary Claire calling from San Antonio, Texas.

Hello, Mary Claire. We’re glad to have you. What’s up?

So I am interested in learning more about the word Hoosier, not as it pertains to someone from Indiana, but the way it’s used in St. Louis, Missouri, where I grew up.

So growing up in St. Louis, it was common to use the word Hoosier as a pejorative, but it was always kind of in a teasing or bantery way when somebody did something silly or classless, I guess. But again, it was silly and teasing. So if somebody spilled a drink on themselves or tripped in front of you, you would say something like, oh, you’re such a Hoosier, or you might even shorten it to you’re such a Hoosier. And my older sister reminded me that she and her friends would even use the term Hoosie, like bourgeoisie, to describe people.

So then when I was in high school, we moved to San Antonio, Texas, and I was sitting around with a group of new friends, and one of them did something foolish, and I said, oh, you’re such a Hoosier. And it was just crickets. They looked at me like I was insane.

Of course.

And I will tell you, that is the first time I found out that Hoosier also meant someone from Indiana. Oh, wow. I didn’t even know. It’s always mystified me that it could have such a specific usage in St. Louis and then mean something else completely different to the whole rest of the world.

Yeah. I don’t know if you know this, but I’m originally from Missouri as well and born in St. Louis and raised in the counties around St. Louis. So I have the same experience you do with using Hoosier in that way. And it’s definitely still used that way throughout St. Louis, both sides of the river, many counties around.

We’re talking a very large circumference of an area of people who use Hoosier to mean hillbilly, redneck, uncouth person. Does that sound about right?

Yeah.

It’s not a perfect fit, but yes.

No.

There’s no perfect fit, but unmannerly.

Yes.

Yes.

And in my experience, it was never necessary. It didn’t go all the way to derogatory. Like I said, it was mostly when I used it or when I was called a Hoosier, it was kind of between friends. It was teasing and funny.

I could see that.

I do know that originally it was more geographically widespread. This particular meaning of Hoosier, even before Indiana picked up on the term and started using it to refer to its own residence, Hoosier was across large parts of the Midwest as we know it today, kind of above the American South, along the Ohio River Valley, below the Great Lakes. That whole region definitely used Hoosier to mean this kind of person we’re talking about.

It could have just been something like a country bumpkin, or it could have been somebody who had no manners, or somebody who was, I wouldn’t say klutz is the right word, but they’re just kind of always doing the wrong thing at the wrong time. That kind of person.

Yes, absolutely.

That’s so interesting.

By the 1830s, Indiana residents started appropriating that term for themselves. Now, we don’t know where Hoosier came from. And I know I’m going to get a lot of emails going, yes, we do. No, we don’t, because there’s a lot of theories and a lot of them have no backing. And I’m not going to get into it here because we’d be here all day.

But around the 1830s, the Indiana residents started calling themselves Hoosiers. But that term persisted and continued to be used outside of Indiana for just anybody who wasn’t with it. They didn’t have culture. They weren’t acting according to the rules of the day, the etiquette of the day.

Throughout the Mississippi Valley and the U.S. South, and the Dictionary of American Regional English has examples well into the 1960s and 70s and 80s of it being used in Louisiana and the Carolinas, where you might talk about Arkansas Hoosiers or Mountain Hoosiers.

Oh, wow.

So it does exist in little tidbits here and there throughout the United States, but for some reason it’s stuck in St. Louis. And that reason mainly is that we forget in the modern age what a metropolitan powerhouse St. Louis was at one point for the culture of this country.

St. Louis was, for the longest time, right up there in the running with New York City and Philadelphia as the city, because it was on the river traffic and it was the launching point for all this westward migration and many other things. St. Louis was a thing. And so it doesn’t surprise me at all that St. Louis would have this as part of this lexicon of St. Louis language that stuck.

Because you may not know this, but St. Louis is a little bit of a linguistic bubble anyway. Because of that, that history is a powerhouse.

Yeah. Hoosier isn’t the only term or a thing like that that I have found living in Texas and traveling over different places. There are a lot of little quirks that seem to kind of stick around St. Louis. But that’s the short version.

Well, Mary Claire, thank you so much for calling and sharing this story and give our best to your mom as well. Thank you so much. Have a great day.

All right. You take care now. Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

If you’ve had that experience, we’d love to hear about it and talk about it with you. 877-929-9673 or send us an email. That address is words@waywordradio.org.