Nuptial Vowels

The other day I was talking to my daughter and I used the word “hoodlum” (I don’t remember the context, but I was probably describing what all the boys in the high school she would soon be attending were like and why she should avoid having any contact with them). She didn’t know the word. Usually, she hates it when I use words she doesn’t know—“eighteenth-century words,” she calls them—but this time, after the obligatory dissing, she expressed some interest and asked if it meant the same thing as “’hood,” as in “Boyz ‘n da.” I told her it didn’t, but in fact I hadn’t the slightest idea where “hoodlum” came from.

It turns out that nobody has much of an idea where it comes from. Some claim that it derives from “huddellump,” which in the Bavarian dialect means “rags” and “a slovenly, careless person,” but since the word first appeared in 1871 in San Francisco, this seems something of a stretch, and even one of the etymologists who puts forward the theory admits that it is “a guess,” and then adds rather lamely, “though perhaps better than average.”

The San Francisco origin has tempted another etymologist to suggest a rather different origin. In the late nineteenth century, he says, San Francisco was hit by a crime wave, and one of the gang leaders responsible was a man named Muldoon. Newspaper writers wanted to blame someone, but since there was no legal evidence that Muldoon was the real culprit, in their stories they spelled his name backward just to be safe, attributing every robbery, assault, or act of petty larceny to someone named Noodlum. But that was so obvious—and it so obviously left them open to a law suit—that they changed the ‘N’ to an ‘H’ and, voila, Hoodlum was born.

It’s a flimsy theory that doesn’t have much evidence to support it, and I was ready to dismiss it out of hand until I remembered the putative origin of the closely related word, “hooligan.” This word is said to derive from an Irish family who lived in Southwark, London, around 1900. Their surname was Hooligan, and they were reputed to be behind the crime wave that gripped the city at that time.

Still, as the poet and amateur etymologist John Ciardi remarked about this supposed origin of the word hooligan, “never trust an Englishman to be accurate in ridiculing the Irish; with the English the ridicule comes first and the details may be freely invented along the way.”

—Dennis