• hooligan •
Printable Version Pronunciation: hoo-lê-gên • Hear it!
Part of Speech: Noun
Meaning: A rowdy, a tough, a nasty, a ruffian, a petty thug, destructive young person.
Notes: We think of hooligans as gang members, young people who think it fun to damage property. This behavior is known as hooliganism. This noun was at one time used as a verb meaning "to bully, treat roughly" in the UK but that usage has since fallen by the wayside.
In Play: The crucial concepts surrounding this word are "young" and "mean", so it works well in, "Some hooligan tried to knock over my mailbox last night but broke his baseball bat instead." Every generation produces hooligans in new and unexpected places: "More and more cities are tiring of the work of hooligan artists (artistic hooligans?), who spray-paint their work on building walls that do not belong to them."
Word History: This word first appeared in print in the police-court reports of a newspaper in the summer of 1898. That it comes from a corruption of the phrase, Hooley's gang, is highly dubious. More likely it derives from the name of some Irish ruffian by the name of Hooligan. The name figured in a popular music-hall song of the 1890s, which described the doings of a rowdy Irish family. There was also a comic Irish character by the same name in a series of adventures in Funny Folks. (Today we owe a debt of gratitude to the rowdy mind of Larry Brady, who keeps coming up with fascinating words like this one.)
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