Suped Up vs. Souped Up

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Mike Ekanaka.

Where are you calling from?

Calling from, actually, I’m in Glendora, but I live down in Irvine, California.

Well, welcome to the show. What can we do for you?

Well, I have an interesting thing, I guess, that came up a couple of weeks ago.

The local paper in Orange County is the Orange County Register, and there was an article in there about a company called First who was going to manufacture some specialty cars, and they referred to them as being souped up, and it was spelled S-U-P-E-D, up.

Now, I grew up in L.A. in the 60s, and when first was just kind of getting started doing drag racing parts. And there were a lot of souped-up cars in those days. And I always saw it spelled S-O-U-P-E-D, like the liquid condiment or whatever.

And I had never thought about that spelling until I saw this article. So for all this time, I’ve been either wrong or just assuming that I knew how it was supposed to be spelled.

-huh. So that article rocked your world and you had to call.

A little bit. It gave me pause.

-huh. -huh.

I’ve seen the S-U-P-E spelling, and I know that it’s fairly common out there, but it’s not the correct spelling. The correct spelling is S-O-U-P.

It is.

Even if it’s in a newspaper.

I had done a little bit of digging around, and I found some things on the web about SUPED. Perhaps have been referred to a supercharger as a shortened version of that. And I think most of the people participating in that particular site discounted that.

And they said it may have harkened back to, I guess it was a common practice in the early days of horse racing to inject performance-enhancing drugs into animals instead of people. And that was called soup, and they think it may have sprung from that source.

Soup was and still is sometimes used to refer to any kind of liquid or even a paste, all right? So people will refer to gasoline as soup or they’ll refer to seawater as soup. They’ll refer to the chemicals for developing film as soup. Anything can be a soup, okay?

But a lot of times the soup is more specifically used to mean a drug or a chemical or something that’s used to treat something else. You can see that in the photography use of it and in the use you talked about where horses might have been doped with drugs in order to make them perform better.

And you can find very specific instances of this being mentioned in periodicals from the 1920s and 1930s. It’s a really strong theory that that’s a place where the transfer of horse racing to car racing, you can see how the jargon might easily be borrowed from one sport into the other, right?

Right.

But there are some difficulties here. You’ll also find soup being used to refer to nitroglycerin. And you’ll actually find places where people are talking about people being souped up on nitroglycerin. That is, they’d taken nitroglycerin as a drug. You know, it’s good for your heart, for example, under certain conditions and certain quantities.

And nitroglycerin was used to blow safes. And safe crackers called it soup, and they called blowing the safe souping the safe. So we’ve also got this other use where we’re specifically talking about a chemical that is powerful and explosive.

And you could see how nitroglycerin, you might say, well, I’ve modded my car to such a degree that it’s like it’s running on nitroglycerin instead of gasoline, right?

Right.

All right. So, and then we go to the final part, the one that you mentioned. And I think it might be incorrect to dismiss the supercharge theory out of hand. You can find uses of it in the 1930s.

And we’re talking about the beginning of the heyday of high-performance automobiles and machinery, right? You will find specifically people talking about a supercharger and saying that it’s a gadget that soups up a motor.

In those words.

With a U or not.

No, that’s the very interesting thing. The supercharger, S-U-P-E-R, soups up the motor, S-O-U-P. So it’s really interesting. There might be some lending there, but unequivocally the spelling is S-O-U-P. The origin, of course, is in doubt.

Anyway, so we’ve gone far afield here, Mike, but I hope we’ve offered you some information that you can take back to your pals.

Well, that is interesting, and thank you very much. I appreciate it.

You’re welcome.

I hope we didn’t give you soup in a basket.

No, it was very interesting, and I appreciate it.

Okay, we’ve given you soup in a bowl.

Okay.

Thank you, Mike.

Thanks.

Bye-bye.

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