Godamn hoople-head cocksuckers.
I've got my father addicted to Deadwood after I lent him my DVDs. As his nearest conduit to the interweb he asked me to look up the meaning of the oft-uttered term 'hoople-head'.
The funny thing was that I didn't get a satisfactory answer, but I did end up at some girl's blog who had used the term. She wrote how she suddenly got tonnes of hits on his blog after including the hoople-head in the body of his blog. She guessed lots of people were watching the show, Googling the term, and hers was one of the few instances Google could find.
"Lots of folks are looking for hoople-heads, cocksuckers, Jack McCall, and tight Levis so, of course, they wind up here. How disappointed they must be when they find no real information on hoople-heads or Jack McCall just my peculiar musings about Deadwood," she wrote.
So here goes, maybe if I mention hoople-head a few more times a million Deadwood fans will end up here.
Some people did have some interesting theories on the origins of the word, none of them trult credible though.
Posted by: Terry Houlahan | May 15, 2004 at 11:39 AM
Hoople is a city in North Dakota, so one could presume that hoople-head was a generic term for someone that left their farming community to try to strike it rich in the gold rush fever.
Makes sense I suppose, but was this town even around back then?
Posted by: YAPAPI KRUSTY© | May 18, 2004 at 07:35 AM
The town name is unrelated to the usage here, unless someone had an odd sense of humor. Hoople is from the Dutch meaning "hoop", go figure...
It stands to reason that hoople head would be a hoop head, that is, empty headed. Seems to be a borrowing of a Dutch insult as opposed to being applied to Dutch people.
This doesn't make much sense because hoop just means hope in Dutch, which is no insult.
Posted by: AdventureGirl | May 18, 2004 at 09:30
Synonyms: Hay-eater, Honky, Hoople
Spears, Richard A. Slang and Euphemism:
A Dictionary of Oaths, Curses, Insults, Sexual Slang and Metaphor, Racial Slurs, Drug Talk, Homosexual Lingo, and Related Matters.
Middle Village, N.Y.: David Publishers, 1981: 88
This seems the most credible, but the following is probably just as credible, from the Urban Dictionary
That guy is a real hoople.
And therefore: Hoople-head: dervied from slang "hoople" which means a drunk; a drunkard
Source: HBO Original Series Deadwood
Give those hoople heads some drinks to calm them down.
