Hooligans, Thugs, Vandals and Tories!

All of the people above, in the title of this post, were real people, who were famed as heartless murders and robbers, but three of the above reformed and stopped their evil ways many years ago, while one of the group carries on regardless.

The Hooligans or Houlihans were a notorious nineteenth-centaury Irish family living in London. So bad was their reputation for drunken violent behaviour that songs and stories were told of them in the music halls of the time. The most famous of the family was Patrick, who robbed and murdered at will but died soon after he was caught and goaled.

The Thugs or Thuggee were a bunch of professional Hindu assassins, whose lineage can be traced back to seven tribes. The word Thuggee or ‘Thag’ derives from Hindi, and means "thief". They were followers of the Goddess Kali, the Goddess of destruction, and were reputed to have murdered over a million people.

They were eventually tracked down and wiped out by another bunch of thugs at the time. known as the British.

The Vandals Were a Germanic tribe that sacked Rome in 455. It’s ironic that a tribe were so reviled for damaging a city that had itself ransacked half of the known world: methinks a little  bit of, pot, kettle, black is going on here. The name derives from the Germanic ’Wanal’ meaning wanderer.

The Tories Were Irish outlaws.  Have you noticed how many derogatory terms in use in the English language are associated with the Irish? The Tories were robbers and outlaws the word derives from the Irish "Tooruighe" meaning "plunderer". The British political party adopted the name the ’Yorkist Tories’ in 1680 but the term was superseded by "The Conservative Party" in 1830.

The word "Tory" has now come to mean "Bandit", "Plunderer" and "Robber", the only difference being that they are no longer outside the law as they do this.

There are lots of words which we use on a daily basis without ever knowing where they came from or what the original terms were. Often the terms that were used are not very "PC" and were used against people who were often themselves being persecuted. But some arrive through popular culture such as, "Zits", "Nerd", "Wedgies" and "Dude".

My favourite story of how a word came into use is the word, "Quiz".

The story goes that a Dublin theatre owner, James Daly, who was down on his luck and in need of some cash, made a bet that he could introduce a word into the language within twenty four hours.

He hired a group of street urchins to rush around Dublin painting the word "Quiz" on walls as they went. People were "puzzled" by the word and what it meant, and it soon became the talk of the town and the word was born.

But unfortunately, like a lot of these urban myths, with a little searching it’s quite easy to find that there was no evidence to back up this story: the word actually derives, like lots of our words, from Latin, but it’s still a good story.

I would like to introduce a word into the English language, "Gezzy" 

Doing a Gezzy:  to deceive others, pointlessly, for your own amusement, (see previous posts).