Jun

21

Word Of The Week: June 21st, 2008

Posted by Christopher Waldrop

June 21, 2008 |

The funny thing about words is how they can completely turn around in their meanings, often going from something incredibly negative to very positive. The term yahoo, for instance, was coined by Jonathan Swift. As a noun it meant the very basest, grossest, most primitive form of humanity imaginable. In Gulliver’s Travels the sentient, speaking horses–the houyhnhnms–called the vile, uncivilized humans who shared their island yahoos. And Gulliver would be extremely distressed to find he was, at heart, a yahoo. Fortunately it’s something most of us have come to terms with, and we don’t go around with cloves stuck up our noses and whinnying.

The term, though, has taken on a very different meaning, mainly because it began to be used as, as the Oxford English Dictionary defines it, “An exclamation of excitement, exultation, or delight.” Trust a dictionary to take a fun word and completely deflate it…anyway, Yahoo was also adopted as the name of a very popular search engine. It was the first I remember using, and, although it’s now been supplanted by others, it is still admirable for trying to fit numerous web sites into categories for easy reference. It’s enough to make you shout, “yahoo!” even if you are a yahoo.


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