hoopers/hoopies

[Joan Houston Hall]

See DARE, where "hoopy" = "hoosier," where "hoosier" means a rustic or
hillbilly.


At 06:21 PM 6/11/2004 -0400, you wrote:
>---------------------- Information from the mail header
>-----------------------
>Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
>Poster:       Beverly Flanigan <flanigan at OHIOU.EDU>
>Subject:      Re: hoopers/hoopies
>-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>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.