Whoop it Up

Hello, welcome to A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Amanda Hooper calling from Evansville, Indiana.

Well, hello, Amanda. Welcome to the show.

Hi, Amanda.

Thank you.

What’s up?

Thank you.

What can I do for you?

Well, I am calling with a question regarding a phrase my mother often used when I was a child.

And when I was growing up here in southwestern Indiana in the 1980s, my mother would, we’ll say, encourage my sisters and me to hurry.

Say, if we needed to leave the house for an appointment or finish a chore, she’d encourage us by telling us to hoop it up.

She’d say, hoop it up, girls, or Amanda, hoop it up, and then we’d know it was time to get moving.

And now it’s funny because my married name is now Hooper, and I use it with my own two kids nowadays.

But I’ve never heard anyone other than my mother use this phrase.

Of course, you hear it referencing basketball, but my family has not been involved in sports or specifically basketball.

And when I asked my mother about where she got it, she said her grandmother.

So my great grandmother would use it in the same way toward my mother and her siblings.

And she’s not sure otherwise where it comes from.

And Amanda, you said that she used this expression, hoop it up, to quote unquote, encourage you all to get out of the house.

Yes. Usually it came after kinder, more patient warnings.

Hurry up, girls. It’s almost time to go.

And then finally, when she was probably at her wits end, it was hoop it up, hoop it up.

Yeah, that makes a whole lot of sense, really, because there’s a long tradition of urging people along by making noise.

That sounds like hoop or oop or something like that.

There’s the expression hoop it, which can mean to run away.

And if you’re hooped out of something, you’re driven out.

And hoop it up is another version of that.

It sure sounds like it.

Well, I had wondered if it was related somehow to maybe whoop it up, but she always said hoop.

So I was just curious about that history.

Yeah, they’re related for sure because some people do pronounce the H and hoop, like hooping cough, and some people don’t.

And so they’re actually the same.

They’re the same expression.

Hoop it up and whoop it up are the same.

Oh, really?

That’s funny because my husband, we tease, he often pronounces the H with the WH sound harder than I do.

So I tease him about that.

So I totally get that pronunciation difference now.

So, Martha, am I remembering correctly, this is related to the French houpla.

It’s H-O-U-P-L-A, right?

Which is a cry to dogs or something like that.

Yeah, motivation to the dogs hunting the animals.

But also it means excitement in English.

We borrowed it in the word hoopla in English.

Yeah.

So it’s a vigorous motion accompanied by noise that sounds pretty similar.

Well, excellent.

That does a lot of clarifying for me.

And I just find it all so fascinating.

I’m a language teacher myself, so I love your show,

And I love learning about the history of words and phrases and their evolution.

So I’m so glad that you could answer this for me.

We’re glad to help.

Thank you, Amanda, so much.

Thank you.

All right, take care.

You too.

877-929-9673.