yahoo

[Paul]

If you're just going to be sensible, there goes all the fun!

David A. Daniel wrote:
> This seems to be turning into something much more convoluted than it needs
> to be. There are two basic senses of yahoo: (1) the boorish, stupid person;
> (2) an interjection of the yippee variety. In the hick sense there are two
> pronunciations: YAH-hoo and YAY-hoo. For the interjection there is one basic
> pronunciation: yaahhhh-HOOOOOO! The people at yahoo.com intended for the
> company name to be the interjection, with respective pronunciation. Didn't
> catch on, morphed into YAH-hoo, which is really neither here nor there in
> terms of a meaningful name as it is not the interjection and it does indeed
> refer to a yokel. Not what they had in mind. This will no doubt become a
> case study at HBS as to why Google is doing so much better...
> DAD
>
>
> From: American Dialect Society [mailto:ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU] On Behalf Of
> sagehen
> Sent: Tuesday, April 01, 2008 6:50 PM
> To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
> Subject: Re: yahoo (was: 'Top Words from 2007'...)
>
> ---
>
> on 4/1/08 1:40 PM, Tom Zurinskas at truespel at HOTMAIL.COM wrote:
>
>
>> Of interest here is that no one has heard of the pronunciaton YAH-hoo as
>>
> the
>
>> majority form, even though that's the way the yahoo.com pronounces it.
>>
> Very
>
>> very strange.
>>
>> Tom Zurinskas,
>> ~~~~~~~~~~~
>>
> Hunh?  I've never heard "yahoo" in the Swiftean sense & its derivatives
> pronounced any other way than YAH-hoo. Furthermore, in my experience, the
> "yippee!" sense is far less-used than the ignorant oaf sense.
> Who remembers how the pilot that rode the bomb down at the end of Dr.
> Strangelove pronounced it (if that was the word he used)?
> AM
>
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> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>
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> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>
>
>

--


"Our youth now love luxury. They have bad manners, contempt for authority;
 they show disrespect for their elders and love chatter in place of
 exercise;  they no longer rise when elders enter the room;  they
 contradict their parents, chatter before company;  gobble up their food
 and tyrannize their teachers."
        Socrates 500 AD

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org