whoop-de-doo
n.— «Another rider racing down the straight called the “L.I.E.” (after the Long Island Expressway) fails to negotiate the washboard bumps, or “whoop-do-dos,” as he should have and very nearly falls.» —“A Boom Grows in the Dust” by John Thomas Wark New York Times May 15, 1977. (source: Double-Tongued Dictionary)
Further reading
While vacationing on Costa Rica’s Caribbean coast, a listener encountered an Australian who used the term skylarking to mean “horsing around.” The verb to skylark goes back hundreds of years and once referred to racing through the...
A magnificent new book celebrates the richness and diversity of 450 years of written and spoken English in what is now the United States. It’s called The People’s Tongue, and it’s a sumptuous collection of essays, letters, poems...