Noodlums
On the origins of slang in old San Francisco
THE Muldoons, a San Francisco street gang in the 1880s, could have been immortalized in the vocabulary of American slang. New York’s Bowery Boys and Dead Rabbits bask in the limelight of public vilification. The Muldoons? Not even an endnote.
The story involves a timid newspaper reporter, bad penmanship, and an English lexicographer, Eric Partridge. According to the gullible slangmaster: In a Victorian era news windup on the violent Muldoons, the writer in San Francisco prudently spells their name backwards. Good penmanship is rare among journalists of any era. The typesetter sees the reporter’s scrawled “n” as an “h.”
Muldoon? Hoodlum!
If the tale is true, which is doubtful, the mistake is a break. The change rescues a helpless public today from expressions like “the noodlums” and, worse, “He’s a known nood.”
Stop it right there. Eric Partridge is perched in a groaning pear tree of beguiling slang yarns. It’s not unusual. Consider the origin of “cop.” According to most English-American dictionaries, it comes from an obsolete French verb, caper, which springs from a Latin word for “capture.” Others solemnly trace it to an acronym, “Constable On Patrol,” or copper buttons or badges never seen, we are told, on any police uniforms of the time.
Daniel Cassidy, San Francisco author in 2007 of How the Irish Invented Slang, maintains “cop” is not slang at all. “The Irish verb ceap (pronounced k’ap) means precisely ‘to seize, stop, catch, intercept, grab…’ ”
Back to the hood. Peter Tamony, the San Francisco slang scholar, writes in Western Folklore: “Discussion and difference reinforced its usage to make it and its clipped form, hood, the most forceful term to describe a ruthless criminal for a century.”
He refers to “folk etymology” as “a tendency to give a more familiar form to an unfamiliar word.” And besides, folk myths are more fun.
For example: Herbert Asbury and other writers buy into folk wisdom and report that street ruffians cried “huddle ‘em” to surround and beat their victims.
Tamony would laugh. If he could. Like Partridge, Cassidy, and Asbury, he rests in what slang scholars would call Happy Valley. To the Mission District savant, the provenance of “hoodlum” would be much less fun than “huddle ‘em.” He gives credit to word detectives George Gessner and J.T. Krumpelmann. They come up with hodalum, dialectical German slang imported to San Francisco in the 1850s by a wave of Swabian-speaking immigrants from the Kingdom of Bavaria and the adjoining Grand Duchy of Baden.
Etymologists differ over the origins of “hoodlum,” but most agree that the infectious pejorative breaks out in San Francisco in the 1870s and metastasizes throughout urban America. The Muldoons sink into the neverland of philological mud.
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Sources
Patricia T. O’Connor and Stewart Kellerman. “Are Two Hoods Better Than One?” Grammarphobia (blog). Online: grammarphhobia.com/2016/05/hood.html
Eric Partridge. Tom Dalzell and Terry Arthur, authors and editors. The New Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English. Oxfordshire, England : Routledge, 2005.
Daniel Cassidy. How the Irish Invented Slang: The Secret Language of the Crossroads. Chico, CA.: AK Press, 2007.
Notes
Many thanks for Margo Freistadt’s editing, research by Maureen Mroczek Morris, and support by Charlie Cardillo.
True Yarns Ltd. is taking a month off, maybe longer, to move to another pre-earthquake home in Bernal Depths.
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