Hootenanny

[Peter A. McGraw]

Disco?!  Good grief--"shindig" was a word my dad used for any big party,
get-together or "do."  So it's older than my 62 years, let alone disco.

Peter

--On Monday, March 7, 2005 5:26 PM -0500 Beverly Flanigan
<flanigan at OHIOU.EDU> wrote:

> Yes, this was how we used the term in the '60s too.  But shindig?  Wasn't
> that disco?
>
> At 05:09 PM 3/7/2005, you wrote:
>> So widespread was it that there was a short-lived TV series of that name
>> about 1965.  Each week it featured a folk-music concert from a different
>> college campus.
>>
>> If memory serves, it was replaced by "Shindig," which featured babes
>> dancing in cages.
>>
>> JL
>>
>> sagehen <sagehen at WESTELCOM.COM> wrote:
>> ---------------------- Information from the mail header
>> -----------------------
>> Sender: American Dialect Society
>> Poster: sagehen
>> Subject: Re: Hootenanny
>> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>> -------
>>
>> > Another sense, that no-one's mentioned so far, is known in the UK from
>> the New
>> > Year TV party "Jools' Annual Hootenanny". Jools Holland is a jazz
>> > pianist, a raconteur and definitely someone to be seen with, and he
>> > hosts this annual broadcast musical gathering from about 11am until
>> > 1am every 31 December - 1 January; fashionable people are invited and
>> > interviewed by him, and play / sing their music if they are musicians.
>> >
>> > Before this ADS-L thread I had never come across the word except in
>> > Jools' context, and so assumed that it must mean something noisy /
>> > raucous / joyful (onomatopoeia from 'hoot' and from the number of
>> > syllables and different vowels
>> > in the word, I suppose). But if there are more Google hits for
>> > 'thingumajig'-like meanings, perhaps Jools calls it that because it
>> > doesn't fit
>> > comfortably into any other definition, so he doesn't really know
>> > *what* to call
>> > it?
>> >
>> > Damien Hall
>> > University of Pennsylvania
>> ~~~~~~~~
>> The other use of "hoot(e)nanny," more like the one you cite, and which I
>> didn't learn until I was in college in the late 40s, was for a
>> singalong--usually folk, labor, political kinds of music. Pete Seeger
>> might have presided over this sort of event: don't really remember. I
>> think that usage was fairly widespread.
>> A. Murie
>>
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*****************************************************************
Peter A. McGraw       Linfield College        McMinnville, Oregon
******************* pmcgraw at linfield.edu ************************