hoopers/hoopies

[Beverly Flanigan]

This reminds me of a request I got out of the blue a few weeks ago:  Some
office folks in northern Ohio were talking about "funny" terms for people,
and they came up with "hoopies."  So they looked up Ohio dialects on
Google, found my name, and called me up.  They said the term connotes
"dumb," and one of them (I heard them all talking in the background) said
he'd heard a similar term, "Oopy," which he thought was PA
Dutch/German.  Does anyone have any idea what these terms mean and where
they came from??  I told the guy at the other end I'd e-mail him if I found
out anything.  (He was with First Energy Corp., of all things!)

At 10:10 PM 6/10/2004 -0400, you wrote:
> From an article in the NYTimes of June 10, 2004 (section B, p. 1, col. 2)
> on malefactors who have been capturing pigeons from NYC parks and
> carrying them to Pennsylvania where they serve as targets at gun
> clubs.  The malefactors throw down crumbs or seeds and catch the pigeons
> under a net.  The article refers to them as "netters", but "Edwin, a
> Bronx pet store owner who . . . asked that his last name not be used,"
> who is an authority on the subject, differs.  ""Actually," he said,
> "they're called hoopers because thay use hoop-shaped hand-held-nets.""
>
>GAT
>
>George A. Thompson
>Author of A Documentary History of "The African Theatre", Northwestern
>Univ. Pr., 1998.