Hooligan

Yobs, thugs and bovver boys, the words go in and out of fashion. Only one seems to be perennially popular: hooligan. So where did this odd-sounding word come from

�

Q. When did the word first come into popular usage

A. It first began to appear, meaning a thief or criminal, in London police-court reports in the summer of 1898, and became immediately popular with the newspapers of the day. Hooliganism, hooliganesque, hooliganic and the verb to hooligan all made their appearance in print. In August that year the Daily Graphic reported on 'the avalanche of brutality...under the name of "Hooliganism"'.

�

By 1904 it had become so well established that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle included 'those senseless acts of Hooliganism' in The Adventure of the Six Napoleons, and in his 1909 novel Tono-Bungay H.G. Wells referred to 'young men of the hooligan type, in neck-wraps and caps'.

�

Since then there's been no looking back.

�

Q. And where does it come from

A. There was a popular music-hall song of the 1890s about a troublesome South-London Irish family of that name, which was also variously spelt Hoolaghan or Houlihan. The family may or may not have been based on a real one: a book entitled Hooligan Nights by Clarence Rook, published in 1899, gives some insight into this, as he claimed that the word derives from one Patrick Hooligan, a small-time bouncer and thief, who lived in the Borough. With his family and a small gang of followers he frequented the Lamb and Flag public house in Southwark. Hooligan murdered a policeman, was put away for life and died in prison.

�

Other sources, however, say it was a mishearing of the term 'Hooley's gang' but this seems never to have been backed up with any evidence.

�

Q. When did it acquire its modern meaning

A. By the 1960s it had taken on the 'yob' connotations that we associate with it today, and now it is almost never used in any other sense.

�

Q. What about yobs, thugs and bovver boys

A.

Yob or yobbo is backslang for boy.

�

Thug comes from the practitioners of Thuggee, a Hindu sect for theives and assassins dedicated to Kali, the goddess of destruction. Their activities so appalled the British Colonial authorities that the sect was suppressed in the 1830s. The name is derived from the Hindi and Mahrathi word thag, swindler or thief.

�

Bovver boys: Lads who cause a lot of 'bovver' or bother. Bovver boots: remember them

�

For more on Phrases & Sayings click here

�

By Simon Smith