Rootin’ tootin’ means noisy, boisterous, rip-roaring, and now belongs mostly to the cowboys of old Western films and cartoons. The two earliest known examples date from 1874, one English and one American, and which country had it first is unsettled. In Lancashire dialect, rootin’ on its own meant meddlesome or inquisitive.
What’s the origin of the phrase ‘Rootin’ tootin”?
Surely, if ever there was an expression that sounds American, this is it. However, the two earliest examples I know of of rootin’ tootin’ in print date from 1874, and one is from the USA and one from England.
The English example of rootin’ tootin’ is in the English poet Edwin Waugh’s collection of rustic dialect stories, The Chimney Corner, 1874:
“Well… Afore hoo’d bin here three days hoo’d hauve a dozen colliers whewtin’ an’ tootin’ after her every neet.”
[Before she’d been here three days she’d have a dozen miners whistling and hooting after her every night.]
The same collection puts the two words side by side. In the story Moider’t Mally a mother counts up the work her children make for her; this passage is from the 1879 Abel Heywood edition of The Chimney Corner on the Internet Archive:
… an’ the rootin’, an’ the tootin’, an’ the tentin’ that I have to go through is beyond …
[… and the rooting about, and the tooting, and the minding that I have to go through is beyond …]
Nodal and Milner’s A Glossary of the Lancashire Dialect, quoted below, gives tent as “to watch, to mind”. Here rootin’ and tootin’ are two items in a run of household chores rather than the fixed pair of later use.
The US example comes from the Indiana newspaper The Evansville Journal, November 1874:
I’m a rooting, tooting, cutting, shooting, carving, card-playing catamount, all the way from Arkansas.
Whether those two above citations are of the same expression or whether they were derived separately in two places I can’t be sure. They do seem to have the same meaning though, so there’s every reason to assume they are one and the same. If that is so then it’s likely that the UK version travelled to the USA - many rural English migrated to the USA in the 19th century but hardly any came the other way.
The phrase itself may well be older than 1874. The English citation above is from a story which uses the colloquial language of rural England, and this would have been in use for many years before it was written down.
Likewise the US example is in a “rootin’ tootin’ cuttin’ shootin’ from Arkansas” format that must have been well used in Arkansas by the time it was recorded. It appears in print frequently enough to make one think it was a popular saying in Arkansas at the time. I would doubt that the journalist who printed it in 1874 was the first to use it.
I suggest that odds are that the term was English first and migrated to the USA, but that’s yet to be proven beyond doubt.
Green’s Dictionary of Slang heads the phrase rooting-tooting, notes rootin’-tootin’ as a variant, and defines it as noisy, boisterous, rip-roaring. Its etymology points to Lancashire, giving the source as “orig. Lancs. dial.; SE root around + toot”. The earliest example Green’s prints is dated 1875, a year later than the two above, and comes from John Nodal and George Milner’s A Glossary of the Lancashire Dialect: “He’s a rootin’ tootin’ sort of a chap.”
That glossary also accounts for the meddlesome sense. It lists “ROOTIN’, part. adj. meddlesome, inquisitive.” and takes the verb from Old Norse, defining root as “to search for anything by feeling with the fingers, or with a stick. Icel. rota, to turn up ground, as a swine”. The Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary derives the compound the same way, dating it to the “late 19th cent.” and calling it a “reduplication of rooting in the sense ‘inquisitive’, an early dialect sense of the compound”. It labels the modern adjective North American and informal, and glosses it as enthusiastic, cheerful and lively.
Etymonline reads the pairing differently. It records rootin’ tootin’ meaning “noisy, rambunctious” only “by 1924”, and says the form “might suggest the sports-fan root”, the American sense of root meaning to cheer or support, which it dates to 1889 in a baseball context. Both of those dates fall well after the 1874 citations above.