Woo-Woo Not-Science

Hello, you have A Way with Words. Hello, this is Liam calling from San Francisco.

Well, we are glad that you called. What’s on your mind?

Well, I am calling with a phrase that I’ve heard a good bit. Seems like maybe a little bit more commonly recently, maybe a social media thing. But anyway, the phrase is woo woo. And in my understanding, it’s an adjective that you can apply to a person or maybe an activity.

And it kind of means that something is a little bit kooky or out there or kind of has some maybe kind of hippie or spiritual connotations.

So you might say, for example, I don’t know, that someone’s a little bit woo-woo if, say, they’re really into acupuncture or maybe they are, you know, they, I don’t know, believe they can communicate with ghosts or something like that.

So maybe it could be a little bit pejorative or it could just be kind of a funny, you know, an appellation to indicate that someone kind of lives their life in a distinctive way.

So anyway, that’s all I got.

Yeah, that’s good. That sounds like a very solid description, don’t you think, Martha?

Yeah, I do. I mean, the idea of, you know, a belief system that’s maybe highly questionable or irrational or unscientific or not reality based.

Although I have to say, if you believe in acupuncture, I guess I’m woo-woo because I feel like I’ve had some help from acupuncture.

Yeah, and that’s what I was going to say.

I think that for me it’s maybe a little bit less saying that something is irrational or highlighting the kind of non-scientific nature of it.

I think it’s – and maybe it might be even kind of a self-acknowledgement.

I’ve heard people say things on social media like, my most woo-woo belief is X.

And then they describe some kind of slightly out there belief they have about the world or the universe.

But it’s kind of in a very, I don’t know, kind of a knowing way.

You’re like, yeah, I know this might sound a little bit weird, but it’s something that helps me exist in the world or whatever.

So anyway, I guess I don’t have a hugely negative connotation.

Kind of self-aware and self-description, though.

Yeah.

Yeah, exactly.

Well, it’s interesting, Liam, this term has not been around all that long.

I mean, we see it in the 1980s and 1990s in the way that you and I are talking about it and Grant.

But before that, in the early 1970s, sometimes it would be used to mean somebody who’s not exactly in their right mind, you know, woo-woo that way.

And it’s almost as if, you know, how you make that motion with your finger on the side of your head to describe somebody like that.

It’s almost like it’s almost like that.

But as far as we know, the term woo woo itself has to do with those eerie sounds that ghosts supposedly make, you know, those ghostly sounds.

Well, I think the two things I’m maybe most interested to hear about are first, whether whether there’s any kind of particular first usage or origin that’s noteworthy.

And then second, whether it seems to be getting any more popular in the last few years, because I feel like I started hearing it a lot on social media in the last couple of years.

That’s a good one. Well, as I said, in the early 1970s, we do see a citation of it in the sense of being not in your right mind from a science fiction writer who describes somebody who’s nuts and out of her skull and real woo-woo, you know.

But it’s not really a flagship first use in such a way that it was like an influential speaker or a bestselling book or something like that.

Right.

But I would say you might have a little bit of the recency illusion happening there, Liam, where it seems like it’s more frequent, but it isn’t.

I will note that I did an entry for this in one of my books, which came out in 2006.

So at the time, it was unusual enough that putting it in my book of French English seemed to make sense.

Oh, interesting.

I definitely think that all the so-called expertise on TikTok of people giving these unsubstantiated medical points of view often fall into the category of woo or woo.

Maybe it’s just a little more salient in the world then, and that’s what makes it appear more common.

Right.

Humans are, by their, I think by instinct, suspicious.

And so woo kind of builds into that idea that somebody else’s belief system is woo-woo and mine is religion.

Right.

Sure.

Yeah, that’s an interesting point.

Well, I meant to tell you guys, the occasion for my calling you, hearing this, was I’d heard it before, but I hadn’t really made note of it.

But I was listening to a wonderful podcast with a rabbi from a Jewish community slash meditation center over in Berkeley.

And he was talking about how his congregation is a little bit woo-woo, but in a very kind of a knowing and friendly way.

Interesting.

That sounds like a perfect use of it.

Good illustration.

Liam, thank you for sharing with us and thanks for your call.

Call us again sometime, all right?

I certainly will.

Thank you.

Have a good one, guys.

Be well.

Great to talk with you.

Nice to talk to you, too.

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