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This column, which discusses dictionary making and etymology, begins with an email I received last week in which a reader vigorously disputes a word origin I championed. Bill, I know you cannot accept an Irish etymology for hoodoo. How did Hausa words find their way into Ireland and thence to Brooklyn in the early 1880s? How did they get to Canada ? The African etymologies are baloney, a chara. The Anglo-American Dictionary editors are hoodooed by anglophilia. Daniel Cassidy Daniel Cassidy is founder and co-director of An Léann Éireannach, the Irish Studies Program at New College of California in San Francisco. His research on the Irish origin of some American slang has been published in the New York Observer (“Decoding the Gangs of New York”), Ireland 's Hot Press magazine, The San Francisco Chronicle, and Lá, the Irish-language newspaper. His book The Secret Language of the Crossroad: How the Irish Invented Slang will be published by CounterPunch Books in Spring 2007. Cassidy was born in Brooklyn and lives with his wife Clare in San Francisco. Daniel Cassidy continues: Hoodoo , n., a cause of bad luck, a jinx; a person or thing whose presence brings bad luck; a magician or necromancer; an evil spirit; an eerie-looking rock pinnacle, or earth pillar, formed by erosion and nature; a mountain in Canada. Uath Dubh, (pron. h-úŏ doo): dark specter, evil phantom, a malevolent thing; horror, dread; a dark, spiky, evil-looking thing. Uath, n., a form or shape; a spectre or phantom; dread, terror, hate. Old Gaelic name for the hawthorn. Dubh, (pron. doo, duv), adj., dark; black; malevolent, evil; wicked; angry, sinister; gloomy, melancholy; strange, unknown. (O’Donaill, 457, 1294; Dineen, 374, 1287; De Bhaldraithe, English-Irish Dictionary, 755; Dwelly, 988) The word hoodoo only enters American language in the 1880s. Most dictionaries derive “hoodoo” from voodoo, a syncretic religion of the African diaspora. This is currently discounted by a number of researchers. Hoodoo rocks are “grotesque eroded landforms” in deserts all across America. There are hoodoos in Alberta 's Dinosaur Provincial Park, the Okanagan Valley of British Columbia, and in Yellowstone Park in the United States. In the 1880s, the hoodoo man was in Brooklyn. “I’M NO GYPSY, I’M IRISH,’ SAYS EDWARD O’ROURKE “Edward O’Rourke, the young man arrested in Flatbush Saturday, accused of posing as a hoodoo man and of collecting $50 from Margaret Meyer, a servant...” (Brooklyn Daily Eagle, July 8, 1901, 20) The Hoodoo was a gallows bird. “HARD LUCK AND A HOODOO -- “The Tale of a Hangman’s Cap and Noose (Brooklyn Eagle, March 25, 1894, 20)
The hoodoo haunted a Brooklyn baseball park in 1887. “A HOODOO SHOT -- Why the Brooklyn Base Ball Team Is Winning -- “...A shadowy figure with wings that spread out at least twelve feet flew in the window...It was the hoodoo beginning his deadly work...The red haired girl...and the white horse... are the mascots purchased two weeks ago by Manager Byrne immediately after the terrible series of disasters... Everything has now prospered and the terrible hoodoo has fled. (Brooklyn Eagle, Aug. 11, 1887, 4)
In 1883, in Scranton, Pennsylvania, the Irish “Hoodoo” was a necromancer. “A young man named Hogan charged Foster Rankin, Edward Horan, Dennis Sullivan, and Albert Hodge with necromancy and conspiracy before Alderman Fuller today... The other night..after having some wine, they introduced him to a magician, or ‘Hoodoo,’ who was supposed to work supernatural wonders. The ‘Hoodoo’ passed his hands over Hogan’s head, and made him think he was President Judge of Lackawanna County .” (N.Y. Times, Aug. 26, 1883, 1)
In the 19th century, in Ireland, English colonialism was a hoodoo. “In Ireland ...he fled from him on sight, for fear he would "hoodoo" them in some way.” (Thomas Addis Emmet, Incidents of My Life, 1911, 75)
Brooklyn poet Walt Whitman visited hoodoo land in Yellowstone Park. “I had wanted to go to the Yellowstone river region – wanted specially to see...the ‘hoodoo’ or goblin land of that country.” (Walt Whitman, Specimen Days, 1883, 1887, 229.)
But the hoodoo has always been in Ireland. Today the phantom of the hoodoo has been euhemerized* to a jinx in sports... “ Leinster break Munster hoodoo with late show -- “CELTIC LEAGUE FINAL - Leinster 24 Munster 20 –.” (The News Letter, Belfast , Ireland ; December 17, 2001 ) * euhemerize - to interpret reductively, chiefly to analyze a myth claiming that the myth is merely a garbled version of reality, of some event that really happened, the story of its happening transformed over centuries into a myth. [casselman definition] Bill, There is lots more research to do on the word hoodoo. The Australian evidence may put another nail in the voodoo-origin coffin. But English dictionary dudes will never accept any Irish etymology for any word. Irish was only the first literate language in Europe after Latin and Greek. It's just a "piker's cant" like all those pesky old colonial languages like Scots Gaelic and Welsh. Beir beannacht, Dan Cassidy
Bill Casselman responds: Dan’s letter has compelling etymology. His public print citations give no evidence of the origin of the word, merely instances of its use after it is an English word. This does not constitute proof of Irish origin and Dan knows it. As for Hausa being the language of origin of the word hoodoo: if African slaves brought the term to America, its initial use might well have been far earlier than Dan’s 19th century citations. The word hoodoo may have first sounded its pleasing owl hoot in American air some 250 years ago, along before it saw use in American print. The Ironhandedness of Lexicographers Every instance of a new word’s dawning does NOT make it into surviving print, no matter how stringent or how arbitrary the criteria that lexicographers impose on dictionary entries. Some part of etymology is educated guess-work. Etymologists often behave as sociologists and psychologists did in the infant days of their sciences. Soc. and psych. folk were at the same time nervous and pompous. They wanted the world to think that sociology and psychology were sciences as worthy of intellectual respect, as rigorous in their statements and proofs as mathematics was. Well, they are still not. However puffed up dictionary makers may be, tracing word origins is NOT an exact science. A very great deal of etymology is supposititious poking and comparative list-riffling, and dictionary makers who seek to disguise this tentativeness with citational blizzards of quotation are doing no favour to the questing reader. Guess Work Is Not Obscene I, for one, would prefer to see educated-guess work included in the etymological entries of dictionaries and plainly labeled “guess work.” Pert, investigative supposition is at least a beginning and has another benefit. Such testings provide verbal spoor for word hounds still snuffling through the textual shrubs, hunting the lexical history of a word that will not easily give up its past. Later, should the etymology of such a word be ascertained beyond doubt, that too can be stated plainly. Hopeful Doubt Emerges The very latest etymology entries in newer revisions of the Oxford English Dictionary written in England are showing faint traces of lexicographical doubt in the written etymologies. A few hesitancies and dubieties have crept into Oxford copy. Three cheers! Huzzahs! The inclusion of a modest demurrer now and then in dictionary copy that is often toplofty and preposterously magisterial is worth applauding. The days of dictionary as Zeus, as verbum-ex-machina to solve all etymological dispute, those days are over, my wee Oxford dears. Get used to it. Adopt or die. The internet is going to deliver all us wordnuts from the dictatorship of dictionary writers. After all, they are mere scribblers just like us. It must be said that in one instant the Oxford English Dictionary exasperates the reader; in the next the OED can offer a passage so well-researched and executed as to be indispensible. I have just completed reading one,the long OED essay (in the 2nd edition 1989 online) about the English prefix be-, a masterpiece of word study. Not convinced that the African origin of hoodoo is wrong, I am willing to admit there may have been ancillary influence afoot. Sometimes in a word’s history, a similar-sounding term can influence and even bolster the use of a word. A mistaken origin, believed by enough users of a word, may insure its popular spread. I certainly agree with Dan that the Oxford English Dictionary researchers are frighteningly pro-British and display a faint but perceptible loathing for all etymological positings that are from us “colonials and wogs.” Below is my own original hoodoo piece offered anew for your critical perusal. HOODOO
Hoodoo Landscape at Writing-On-Stone Provincial Park near Milk River, southern Alberta, Canada . Writing-On-Stone is noted not only for interesting hoodoo rock formations, but also for rock art carved and painted by long-ago aboriginal visitors. Who knew hoodoo isn't from voodoo? Well, the Canadian Oxford Dictionary still thinks the word hoodoo is a mere alternate of the word voodoo, even in the face of current research that updates the African linguistic evidence. But we'll pay Canadian Oxford 's lexicographical stodginess the minor attention it deserves in a moment. First, what is a hoodoo? Every kid who ever traipsed the badlands of Alberta near Drumheller and saw hoodoos has remembered these spooky spikes. Hoodoos are oddly-shaped pedestals of earth or pillars of rock that develop through erosion by wind and water, especially in areas where the sedimentary layers alternate between soft and hard material, for example in horizontal strata of shale and sandstone. Typically a column of stone is created when a hard shale cap-rock on top protects softer underlying sandstone from erosion. You can see hoodoos in Alberta's Dinosaur Provincial Park, down in the border country near Alberta's Milk River as in our illustration at the top, on the banks of the Columbia River north of Cranbrook and in the Okanagan Valley in British Columbia. I saw small hoodoos on a raft trip I once took down the Kootenay River . And there are plenty in Hoodoo Valley near Leanchoil on the edge of Yoho National Park in B.C. The term hoodoo is general across the west of North America, and is not of Canadian origin. French Canadian voyageurs dubbed these odd rock formations demoiselles or ‘young ladies.’ The Dictionary of Canadianisms (1967) states that hoodoo is “of African origin, related to voodoo.” No, it is not. Less forgivable is the lazy passing-on and picking-up of this flabby etymology of hoodoo by the Canadian Oxford Dictionary, a project that had far more money and time than the Dictionary of Canadianisms. And yet what did they do with their time? They just copied this tired old origin, without once checking the modern etymological literature (abundant) on borrowings into English from various African languages. Now much of this fresh, lively, and creative research has been done in American universities in black studies programs. The Oxford Dictionary people in Britain have always been loath to adopt word origins based on American or European linguistic spade work. I've never been able to discover why, unless it is simple British academic disdain for every non-British linguistic endeavour on earth. To repeat: NO, hoodoo is not related etymologically as a word to voodoo. There is a thin strand of semantic connection only. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, black slaves of Hausa origin brought with them to their enslavement in the American south a distinct magic practice called hoodoo. The word comes directly from the Hausa language where the verb hu'du'ba means 'to arouse resentment, produce retribution.' Voodoo is a different word and quite a different concept. The word voodoo comes from another African language called Ewe where vodu is the name of a specific demon or tutelary deity. Voodoo passed into American English by way of Louisiana Creole voudou. Very early in America, hoodoo came to mean ‘jinx’ or ‘cast a spell on’ as a noun and a verb: “Something hoodooed me out in the swamp last night. I think it was my ex-husband.” They are different words entirely, obviously. The Merriam-Webster Dictionaries, the authorative compendium of American English, does accept the new research. Our knowledge of word borrowing has advanced quite beyond the clichés of Victorian "philology" upon which the Oxford English Dictionary was founded. We now understand that, when two groups speaking utterly different languages mingle and must communicate, the loan of a word is not always in one direction. American aboriginal peoples of the northwest picked up the word hoodoo from English-speaking fur trappers and, like them, used hoodoo to refer to any malignant creature or evil supernatural force. That's how it came to be applied to the curious columns of earth or rock. For they were thought to be evil in the mythologies of many first peoples. But, borrowing works in the other direction as well. For example, in Siksika (Blackfoot) mythology, the strange hoodooesque shapes were giants whom the Great Spirit had turned to stone because of their evil deeds. Deep in the night, the petrified giants could awaken and throw boulders down upon any humans passing nearby. European newcomers to what would become the Canadian and American west heard aboriginal peoples' description of these strange formations and translated certain Siksika words and terms from several Siouan languages like Dakota and Lakota and used the word hoodoo as the translation. In some cases the English word displaced the Siouan word. In other cases the Siouan word remained.
Southeast of Drumheller on Highway 10 in southern Alberta , you can drive along the Hoodoo Trail for 25 kilometers viewing typical Badlands terrain and visiting what is left of more than 120 coal mines in the valley. Here towns like East Coulee and Rosedale once supported a rich coal industry. Dozens of exotic hoodoos line the route.
© 2007 William Gordon Casselman
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