 & 
|
Re: Hoo-ah!Posted by Smokey Stover on February 22, 2004 In Reply to: Re: Hoo-ah! posted by Fred Donehoo on February 21, 2004 : : : Has it occurred to anyone else that the American service personnel's "Hoo-ah!" may be a corruption of the English shout, "Hear, Hear," meaning roughly, "Listen to what the man is saying," and is pronounced "Hee-ah, Hee-ah" in parliament. : : Not me. It sounds more like a corruption (!) of "Hoo-ee!" American popular speech is full of interjections (or ejaculations?) which are not contingent on any actual words, but sound more like the directions you might give, say, to a team of horses. Yee-hah! Doesn't that sound like something a teamster would say, a bit like an alternative to Giddy-ap? Then there's "Whoa," very popular nowadays, not to be confused with "Whoo-ee," similar to but not the same as "Whoopee." I once had a neighbor who called his pigs with something like "Hoo-ee" (but not quite--the exact expression is still used only for calling pigs). SS : My own suspicion is that many of our traditional You may well be right about some interjections (besides the usual "Minced oaths") having their origin in one or more actual words. I have become more aware of interjections since my family got a new TV, with closed captions. I use this a lot, since I have some hearing loss, and the captioners try to capture everything. It's one thing to hear the monster growl, another to see a caption saying "Arrrgh". I've seen a lot of occurrences of "Whoo!" that I would scarcely have noticed were it not for the captions. I don't know if you have ever turned on the captioning (assuming you have TV), but it shows you a vast wasteland of mangled English for various reasons related to the difficulty of keeping up. SS
|