The Lexicographer's Rules

My latest slang column in the Malaysia Star explores some new-found slang.

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Over the past few weeks in this space, I’ve shared old slang with you, but now it’s time to look at more recent slang, slang so new it has yet to prove that it will endure. 

From The Independent in London comes a bit of military slang that’s a head-scratcher (a puzzle) at first.  

In December, Jerome Starkey wrote, “Heat-seeking Javelin rockets designed to hit T72 tanks tearing across Europe are very good at finding insurgents cowering in compounds. Marines call it ‘throwing a Porsche at them’, because the missiles cost 65,000 a pop.” 

The expression throw a Porsche at someone has one of the hallmarks of slang: a bit of humour. Of course, the British soldiers are not actually tossing an expensive sports car at the enemy. They are, however, firing missiles that cost just about as much as a high-end sports car such as a Porsche. The slang comes about via metaphor. 

By the way, to say something costs a certain amount of money a pop, means it costs that much for every single one that you buy. You could also say, “Every time I ride the bus, it costs me two dollars a pop.” 

Another metaphor was used to invent the expression Q-tip cruise. This one takes a bit of unpacking (that is, explaining) in order to make it comprehensible.  

Q-tip is a brand name of a type of short stick that has very small tufts of white cotton on the end. They’re sold mainly in North America and are used for putting on make-up, daubing wounds with antiseptic, or cleaning out your ears (although the official advice is not to use them that way because you could do damage to your ear drums). 

The Q is capitalised because “Q-tip” is a proper noun, although it is close to becoming generic in the United States, the same way that the brand name Kleenex is now widely used to mean any tissue paper on which you can blow your nose. The existing generic name of the Q-tip product is “cotton swab.”  

Cruise in Q-tip cruise refers to a pleasure trip aboard a large ship.  

Now, the metaphor comes into play because many of the passengers on Q-tip cruises are senior citizens or just seniors. That is, old people who have white hair that resembles the cotton on the ends of Q-tips. 

Here’s another bit of new slang: to swede. Sweding is a particularly interesting word from a new movie called Be Kind, Rewind. Created by French filmmaker Michael Gondry, the plot revolves around two men who work at a video rental store in which all of the videotapes of movies are accidentally erased.  

So the two men decide to swede the movies themselves, meaning to re-make all of the movies with a home video camera and the barest of props and plots. In use outside of the movie, Gondry and the website for Be Kind, Rewind say that to swede a movie is to insert yourself into it, to make yourself a part of the action. 

Another bit of new slang is to jock. It means to steal, or, in other slang, to bite. Bite and jock are especially used this way on the Internet, where they might be used in sentences like, “Don’t jock my pages!” or “He didn’t write that! He bit it from me.” 

In politics, a slang term that has caught my attention is hispandering. It, too, requires some unpacking before it’s easy to understand.  

First, it’s a blend of the words Hispanic and pandering. Hispanic is an adjective that refers to people from Latin America. In this case, because hispandering is a political term, it more specifically refers to illegal Spanish-speaking immigrants. 

Pandering isn’t slang, but instead is a long-standing English word meaning to give in to the wishes or desires of someone else, especially when those wishes or desires are vulgar or common. It comes from Chaucer’s play Troilus and Criseyde with help from Shakespeare’s version, Troilus and Cressida. 

Where these two words come together is in the middle of the debate over illegal immigration in the United States. Some Americans believe the country should grant amnesty—a period during which the immigration law will not be enforced—to illegal immigrants who have shown that they are hard workers and taxpayers, especially if they have children, since any child born in the United States has the right to be an American citizen, even if their parents are not. 

Those people who disagree with the idea of amnesty, therefore, believe politicians who do support it are pandering in order to get more votes from people who think the amnesty is a good idea. Voilà, Hispandering. 

My latest column in the Malaysia Star.

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In Howard Marks’ rollicking memoir of a life of crime, Mr Nice, he describes living as a fugitive from justice: “I was fully aware that any one of them could turn me in to the authorities at any time. I just big-headedly assumed that anyone who knew me liked me and wouldn’t do such a thing. I was too nice to be grassed.”

Tattling (tale-telling) is the sort of thing that rascals like Marks have to worry about, so it’s no surprise that the underworld has an abundance of synonyms for it.

To grass someone or to grass someone up means to report them and their activities to the police. While the expression is almost completely unknown in North America, in Britain and Australia no explanation is needed in the press and on televised police dramas.

There’s also a noun, grass, a person who tattles, and supergrass, someone who tattles so much that criminal empires crumble.

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, grass is a shortening of grasshopper, which a hundred years ago was current rhyming slang for copper, meaning police.

However, it could also be rhyming slang for shopper, meaning a person who trades information to the police in exchange for favours. To shop someone to the police means to offer up evidence of their wrongdoing.

These expressions, too, are decidedly British and see little use in North America, except for copper, which has been permanently shortened there to cop.

Snout is yet another one unknown to most North Americans. Both as a verb and a noun, it is more or less the same as grass. It probably comes from the idea of sticking one’s nose – or snout – into someone else’s business. These slang uses of snout and grass come from the early 1920s and 1930s.

Snout, in turn, recalls snitch, yet another synonym for betraying someone to the authorities. Snitch once meant nose or a flick of the nose. To snitch on someone means to squeal or sing like a canary – to tell all dirt to devastating effect – though those latter two terms were probably more popular in black-and-white gangster movies than they ever were among real criminals.

More typically used in North America is nark, which was originally a Briticism dating from the mid-1800s but which has been used in the United States for at least a hundred years. In criminal circles, it especially applies to people who get benefits like leniency, money, news about competitors, etc, from telling tales to the police.

In schools, nark is not just the derogatory term for the kid who tells the teacher about the misbehaviour of classmates but the one who blabs a classmate’s embarrassing secret to the whole school.

However, the verb nark is a little more complex. In the United States, it has been reinforced by the word narc, which is a policeman or detective who specialises in narcotics crimes. Narc is a shortened form of narcotics, which means any illegal drugs, not just ones that make you drowsy. Both the C and K spellings are used interchangeably.

Nark and narc have been tangled up with movie and television plots in which a perp (short for “perpetrator”, a person accused of a crime) trades information about someone else’s drug crime in exchange for a lighter sentence or even for getting off scot-free.

(Scot is an archaic name for a type of payment similar to a tax, so if you’re scot-free, you are free from “paying” by way of punishment or other obligation.)

A word similar to nark is stool pigeon. At its earliest, a stool was a type of decoy used by bird-hunters. A life-like (or dead) bird is perched and then manipulated by a hidden hunter so that the bird seems alive. The intention is to draw real birds into believing there is easy prey to be had.

In modern use, it means a police informer, but it has historically been used to mean a decoy or person used as a front for a criminal operation. The metaphorical uses of stool pigeon to mean a person who is controlled by another seem to have first been used in the 1830s. Such a person is fronting – pretending to the criminals to be something they’re not – so that they can lure the criminals into a false sense of safety. Pigeon, stool, and stoolo are all synonymous variants.

Louse, snake and weasel are still more ways to call someone a nasty name for an informer, though they are also perfectly good general terms of abuse. Rat, too, though it is now a bit dated but oh-so-evocative.

Rat shares a connection with another informer, a ratfink, which in turn can be shortened to fink. Ratfink contains within all the loathing we feel for dark, scurrying creatures that thrive on our filth and are loathed even by the loathsome.

My latest column from the Malaysia Star.

Slang is the language of young people. It is a fast-moving river and although its bends and flows seem the same, they are, they must be, composed of different cascades and crests. We learn the slang of our generation and it is always the slang we know best, but our slang terms are usually new words for old ideas.

Look at the generational ways of saying “goodbye.” In the 1980s, “I’m out of here” became “outta here” which became the interjection “audi,” spelled after the car brand, and, therefore, sometimes rendered as “Audi 5000.” Although it’s a bit old-fashioned, some folks still use it where “so long!” might have been used in the 1940s.

In the 1960s, you might have said, “I’m gonna jet” meaning “I’m going to leave.”

In the 1980s, “to blaze” was another way of saying that you’re leaving. Like “audi” and “jet” you still hear it from time to time. It may never be very popular, though, because its space is blocked. A newer, more common meaning for “to blaze” has arisen: “to smoke marijuana.”

And that’s just as well. One of the key traits of slang—what distinguishes it from standard English, from jargon, and from simple humorous wordplay—is its synonymy.

Slang tends to have many words for the same ideas. A zillion words for sex acts or sex organs, bucketloads of admiring and rude terms for men and women, lots of ways to call people smart and stupid, an endless supply of adjectives meaning bad and good, and an astonishingly large list of terms for drugs and alcohol.

So, of course, slang doesn’t need “to blaze” to say “to leave.” It has, for example, “to bounce” with the same meaning. “Let’s bounce! Mikey’s got a band playing at his house.”

“Roll” is another one. “We’re done here. Let’s roll.” It calls on the American preoccupation with cars, suggests something of a caravan (in the sense of a parade of vehicles, not in the sense of a habitable vehicle used by British pensioners on holiday), and has an air of a police action or the military about it. It suggests a band embarking at once in an organised fashion to a specific destination to do something together.

Slang is alchemistic: it has many curious properties. On one hand, it can sound so extraordinarily old-fashioned or out-of-date that even the most dull-witted person can tell that a term is, as they say, radioactive, meaning that if you use it you will be marked as clueless—out of touch, out of fashion, and not even close to being cool. Slang carries with it invisible “best when used by” dates.

Think of “bling” or “bling bling” meaning “ostentatious jewelry or adornment.” It arose from a hip-hop song in 1999 and became overused in less than a year. It soon appeared in advertisements on the sides of buses. Once ad agencies or newsmagazines have picked up on a slang word, if it is not already uncool they are sure to kill it by overexposure.

Slang thrives from a sense of novelty and a sense of being privileged knowledge. You hardly get that if an airline is selling seats with it.

On the other hand, slang, if it does not catch the ears and eyes of the popular press and the writers of popular television and movies, can endure for generations, with each new younger set feeling that the “best when used by” date has not passed.

I’m thinking, for example, of a term for “drunk”—“tore up” or “torn up.” My colleague Connie Eble at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, collects slang from her students every semester. “Tore up” appears on her list from autumn 2006, defined as “extremely drunk,” and given with the synonyms “plastered,” “smashed,” “trashed,” and “wasted.”

Yet, that term was already in use in the 1950s.

“Bomb,” as in “to fail an examination,” is also on the 2006 list, yet dates to the early 1960s. “To bone someone” meaning to have sex with them, which dates to at least as early as the 1970s, is also on the minds of young people in 2006.

I wonder if those students know they’re using slang that is older than they are?

Sorry, this one isn’t about language. But it is about knowing how to do research to prove people right and wrong, which is how I spend a lot of my time in working with language.

So what is this? This is what a Craiglist apartment scam looks like. The Craiglist abuse department took own the ad yesterday, but not before I made a PDF of it as backup. Besides two pictures of a neat, well-furnished apartment, it has this:

$1100 / 2br - frunished 2 bedrooms 2 baths apt (Upper West Side)
12 W 68th St !
This is a building just right next to central Park where all the funs takes place here in NY, is few steps to central Park and you can have a full view from this Unit. Lincoln center is close by and Damrosh Park is near by, the cross streets are central Park west and Broadway easy to access and lots of security.

Utilities Included: Heat,Electric,Gas,Water,AC

If you know New York City real estate, your alarm bells are ringing. A two-bedroom apartment in that neighborhood in New York City does not rent for $1100. My first thought was that it should rent for at least double that.

Then I looked at the pictures. Newish building, nice floors, big windows, lots of space, expensive furnishings. My second though was that the apartment should be at least $2800 a month.

Then I re-considered the location. I put it closer to $3800 a month.

Also, the ad says the cross streets are Central Park West and Broadway. No, they’re not. Twelve West 68th Street is between Central Park West and Columbus Avenue. Broadway is one block further to the west.

Also the mention of Damrosch Park is curious. Who gives a damned about Damrosch Park when you have Central Park a few hundred feet away and when Damrosch is four blocks away on the other side of Broadway and Lincoln Center? Nobody, that’s who.

I figured it was probably a scam, but just in the off chance it was a poorly written and miscategorized ad, I emailed the guy. You see that sometimes: somebody only wants to rent out their apartment for a week and they forget to say so in the ad, making it look like $1100 is the rent for a month, and they make the mistake of not putting it in the short-term rentals. Also sometimes people do a bad copy-and-paste job from one ad to another but they mean no harm. It happens.

But then I got a response from ohus223@aol.com.

Hello and than you for your interest in my apt.
I am the owner and the apt is available immediately,
I am now working at the US Embassy in London, UK (Great Britain) i will work here at least 4 years. Because i can’t come to the US to show you the apartment will make the deal only via Rent.com . To see,inspect and then rent the apartment you will have to send me your details:

Name:
Address:
City:
State:
Zip:

I would also like to know a bit more details about you and a bit about your credit score.

The rent terms are simple:

You can rent the apartment from 6 months to 6 years.
1100$/Month
1 Month Advance 1100$
1 Month Safety Deposit in advance (1100$)

The transaction will be done via Rent.com(an eBay company)

After you send me the details i will start the transaction. You will receive the transaction info and the invoice. I am the apartment owner so because i am out of the country and the apartment has furniture and appliances worth over 30,000$ to see the apt you will have to send a safety deposit, i will not receive this deposit, the payment details will be unavailable to me, i will get the payment only if you decide to rent the apartment, if you do not rent the apartment you will get the money back the same day. After your deposit is verified you will receive the rental agreement and the property key so you can inspect the apartment. After the inspection:

If you do not want to rent the apartment you will receive the deposit back the same day. You will have to return the rental agreement and the key.

If you want to rent the apartment the safety deposit will be given to me and I will keep it as guarantee in case something happens with the furniture/appliances etc. You will receive this money when you do not want to rent the apartment anymore, if everything in the apartment has not been damaged.

The apartment is very close, in walking distance to local transport, bus metro etc. has just been renovated, totally finished, flexible lease, is nice, clean, quiet, has all the facilities and the utilities a man needs including electric Utility, Cable TV, Parking, Laundry in the bldg, Air conditioning, high speed internet, workout facility, well behaved pets are allowed.

The rent is for the whole apartment NOT just a shared room. This is not a sublease, etc, i am the OWNER.

I hope you are a serious person.
Regards,

-- APT DETAILS
2 Bd. Apartment
12 W 68th St, New York, NY 10023

This is a building just right next to central Park where all the funs takes place here in NY, is few steps to central Park and you can have a full view from this Unit. Lincoln center is close by and Damrosh Park is near by, the cross streets are central Park west and Broadway easy to access and lots of security.
 
Utilities Included: Heat,Electric,Gas,Water,AC

Here is the email message as a PDF, which includes more pictures of the apartment. The message is scammeriffic. All the tells are there. It’s 99.99% sure to be a scam, a fraud, a rip-off.

1. The scammer forgot to give a name but is quick to claim to work at the US Embassy in London. It’s an inversion of the normal priority: the first information should be readily divulged, the latter only rarely and cautiously. He’s claiming to work someplace with authority, yet uses an AOL address, doesn’t give further credentials, doesn’t offer references, not even a building manager, superintendent, neighbor, anybody.

2. He’s asking for money just to view the apartment. Nobody reputable will ever ask you to pay money just to view a prospective apartment. Never ever. Walk away. The way it would be handled by somebody reputable is through a broker or management company. This is a town filled with them. Again, you will never be asked to pay money to look at an apartment in this town by anyone who is honest.

3. He invokes “Rent.com(an eBay company)” as if it’s some kind of money-handling authority. To the best of my knowledge, Rent.com is only a listing service and doesn’t handle the transfer of money from renters to landlords. This means he’s probably going to give me the URL to a fake site that claims to be Rent.com and claims to do escrow; that is, it supposedly will hold my money until such time as I authorize its release. Instead, what would happen is that I would sign over my money, he’d receive it, and I’d never hear from him again.

4. He’s obsessed with the money. Most of the message is about money. That, too, is an inversion of priorities. Also, the dollar sign comes after the amount. Maybe he’s a European who owns an apartment here, maybe not, but the email seems designed, otherwise, to make one think the scammer is American, specifically the talk of working there for four more years. Also, the overall writing level is poor and disjointed. The State Department surely requires better performance than that, no matter what you think of its actions or politics. I’d expect somebody working in the US Embassy and owning an expensive apartment to have the best education and the high-quality presentation skills that go with it. Writing well would be ingrained.

5. The list of information for which he’s asking. It’s not that he’s asking for it, it’s the list. Scam after scam, time after time, again and again, features that list or one very similar. In looking at the dozens of 419 scam letters and the “foreign agent” scam letters ("we need someone to ship us merchandise or redirect funds to us") that I’ve received over the last week, I see that many of the 419 scammers include “The List” and ALL of the foreign agent scammers do.

On the off chance I was misreading the email and it was authentic, I googled the building address. Turns out, it’s a historic building and it has a web site with pictures of the building and a list of apartments. This was the clincher: the Craigslist ad is with 100% certainty a scam.

1. The window configuration shown in the scammer’s photos is impossible and does not match the building at all.

2. The view out the scammer’s photos does not match the view on Google street view.

3. There’s no two-bedroom apartment at 12 West 68th Street. There is one in the adjoining 14 West 68th Street, but the photos don’t match at all.

4. There is a 3 to 4 bedroom apartment for rent in the building. The asking price is $7000. I think that confirms my estimate of about $3800 a month for a two-bedroom in that building. That price isn’t a sign of someone desperate for money: they could just knock a few hundred off the going rate, not thousands, and still have renters lined up to sign up.

I sent the scammer one more email trying to get a name. He wrote back, claiming his name is “Gary Barts” and repeating most of the same information in the previous emails. This one is even more about the money.

So, la-di-da, scammer, and goodbye. I’ve done my best to make this as googleable as all get-out.

I would post the raw source of the emails, but since he’s using an AOL account, there’s no indication of his original sending location.

There’s room in any dictionary for all parts of speech, and if the amount of mail sent by interested word buffs is any indication, woot—an interjection or exclamation of celebration or revelry—is a favorite.

It comes in a variety of spellings offline and on. The most common, woot, whoot, and w00t are, for our purposes, variations of the same lexical item, especially since the aspirated aitch is growing less common in American English. The latter variant, w00t, has two zeroes in place of ohs, a common characteristic of words originating from online entertainment, especially in multiplayer games, where goofy and ironic l33tspeak sometimes prevails. Other online variations are w00+ and w007.

As is the case for most words, the most popular question about woot is “Where did it come from?” Unfortunately, its origins are disputed and, also like most words, it’s impossible to say with any certainty what the true origins are. Trying to come close to the term’s roots is a game of odds, Occam’s razor, and believability.

After a couple of examples of “whoot” or “woot” as an onomatopoeic representation of video game sounds in news stories from 1982, the earliest clear-cut use of the word found so far is in the name of the Atlantic City, N.J., entertainment tabloid The Whoot! which shows up in 1988 as a sponsor of the ugliest bartender contest in Philadelphia. In 2003 The Whoot! changed its name to the Atlantic City Weekly. Current AC Weekly editor Michael Epifanio says that The Whoot was so-named by founder Lew Steiner after “night owls who would pull all-nighters to scout out the bars, clubs and restaurants and then send the publication out to print.”

Other unlikely origins for the term have been proposed. In discussing the web site of consumer-electronics retailer Woot.com, a 2004 story in Ad Age claimed that the word originated of the phrase “Wow! loot” in the role-playing board game Dungeons and Dragons. The game, created in 1973 and released to the public in 1974, is unlikely as a point of origin. The Ad Age article (besides other sources referring to it) is the only source so far found that connects the word to the term in more than 30 years of the game’s existence. Given the popularity of D&D in the Eighties, it should have, by all rights, showed up in connection with the term woot long before 2004.

A related claim is that it came from multiplayer online games like Everquest and Ultima Online where it is said to have been associated with the phrase “wondrous loot,” or even with the same “wow, loot!” as in D&D, when a player’s character came across gold or wealth in the game. It’s also been credited to the online game Quake, where it is said to have been associated with the sound a player’s avatar makes when it jumps. While it is entirely possible that these games, which had tens of thousands of registered users, could have helped popularize the term, the first written evidence for woot occurred well before these games existed. Quake, the oldest of the three, was first released in 1996.

Another—and, frankly, halfhearted—claim, is that it comes from the Scottish interjection “hoot!” There is indeed such an interjection, according to the Dictionary of the Scots Language, and in various forms it dates as far back as 1698, appearing in such notable works as Robert Louis Stevenson’s 1886 novel Kidnapped. The problem here, though, is that the Scots hoot! is negative. It’s not a crowing comment of satisfaction and delight, it’s “an exclamation used to express annoyance, disgust, incredulity or remonstrance or in dismissal of an opinion expressed by someone else,” the same as tut! or fie! While such inversions of meaning are not unheard of—nice essentially reversed its meaning over 600 years, going from meaning “silly or foolish” to “pleasant, kind, or neat in appearance"—they are not common and, like nice, take a long time. From the first citation the DSL has in 1698 to the latest in 1933, the Scots hoot shows no signs of changing.

More implausible as the origin is the backronym We Own(ed) the Other Team, also said to come from use in unnamed multiplayer video games. A backronym is a word interpreted as an acronym after that word has already been around a while. We know the word existed before the phrase because the phrase doesn’t show up in online discussions groups until March 2003. The longer phrase easily could have existed in multiplayer game chatter before then, but in general, once a term is popular in game chatter, it quickly also shows up in web and Usenet discussions related to the game, which is not the case here.

Elsewhere woot is claimed to come from root, the user name given in Unix-based operating systems to the administrator’s account. This lacks any supporting evidence at all, except for dubious claims of “I remember,” and is rebuffed here for the sake of completeness.

The most likely explanation, as is usually the case, is far simpler. Woot is, with some caveats, probably derived from and most likely popularized by the dance catch phrase of 1993, “whoot, there it is!” In clubs and on dance floors across the country, in half-time shows and in baseball stadiums, “whoot, there it is” and plain old “woot!” were shouted long and loud by millions. It was used by hype men at hip-hop shows, dancers and cheerleaders at ball games, DJs at discos, and probably by ball-callers at bingos.

If woot had any kind of real presence before the songs—as something other than the name of the publication from Atlantic City—it has not yet been found. As a clear-cut term of celebration or revelry, it simply did not show up in the trillions of words published before 1993 and currently archived online and in periodical databases. Even if it did exist and for some reason did not show up in print, the “whoot, there it is” dance catch phrase certainly reinforced any pre-existing usage. That all relevant citations for the term appear after 1993 supports this.

The story of woot, as we know it, is simple. There were two similar songs on the charts that year. In April “Whoot There It Is” by 95 South (Ichiban Records) was the number seven best-selling song in Central Florida, according, to the Orlando Sentinel. “Whoomp! (There It Is),” by Tag Team (Life Records) out of Atlanta showed up at number 15 on Billboard’s R&B singles 27 May 1993 and stayed for 45 weeks on the Billboard top 100, where it reached number 2. It was the more popular of the two songs.

Both tunes came out of the dance music scene, where it was chanted by crowds, much like “the roof, the roof, the roof is on fire,” in the clubs. By June 1993 both songs were popular enough across the country that USA Today and other newspapers wrote about their similarities—they are strikingly alike, fuddy-duds were already complaining about overdosing on the new catch-phrase, and good-natured arguments took place about which was the canonical form, whoot or whoomp. “Whoops, there it is” was another, less-common variant. (The three variants, incidentally, are good evidence that the term was originally oral.)

Jay-Ski, who produced “Whoot, There It Is,” said in a 1997 interview, “There were eight versions of that going around. The idea came from the streets, and even though the 95 South one might have been recorded first, it was Tag Team who released it earlier. I sold three-and-a-half million of mine, though. And now I’ll be sitting at home watching a football game and hearing it played in the stadium—that’s a big thrill. We even were invited to perform it at the top of the fifth inning in the fifth game of the ’93 World Series between the Phillies and Toronto, and that was the best crowd that I’ve ever performed for.”

Cecil “DC” Glenn and Steve “Roll’n” Gibson, the two men in the musical act “Tag Team,” say in the book Colorado Rocks by G. Brown (Pruett Publishing Co., 2004, p. 128) that they picked up the “Whoomp” in their song from the Arsenio Hall show:

“People had been saying ‘There it is’ forever. Everybody in Arsenio Hall’s television audience used to the ‘Wooof’ chant. We put that together with the ‘There it is’ dance-floor chant we were hearing at the club.

Gibson recalled that DC said, “Oh, man, we need to do a song called, ‘Whoom, there it is.”

“All I said was, ‘How do you spell it?”

The claim that their “whoomp” came from Arsenio’s audience chant should not necessarily be taken at face value: memories are notoriously off-kilter when it comes to remembering such things. They are clouded by wishful thinking, cognitive dissonance, and a desire to be helpful.

But the show aired from 1989 to 1994 and there’s no doubt that the “woofing” of the Arsenio audience was much-imitated on television shows such as Saturday Night Live, that the similar-sounding chant “whoot whoot whoot” or “whoomp whoomp whoomp” was shouted across the country, and that, for a time, “whoot, there it is!” was an immensely popular catch phrase anywhere in America where people gathered to party or celebrate.

It was also used by Julia Roberts’s character in the 1990 movie Pretty Woman, where her low class use “whoo(f) whoo(f)” was contrasted to the refined setting she was using it in. She even does the hand-gesture of the Arsenio audience.

It’s my guess all that is left of that fad now is the neat little celebratory word “woot!” used mainly an exclamation of joy at minor victories and unexpected pleasures, with a slightly less common use as a flat sarcastic remark in response to a minor disappointment or letdown. It’s enough.