Hoosh, hoosh, and more hoosh
Posted Wednesday, August 6, 2003

We are feeling quite adrift here in this borrowed bungalow: deprived of our usual bookish surroundings and of a reliable, fast internet connection, we are not sure that we will survive this pseudo-vacation much longer. (We have also not been able to check our e-mail for this site, so we apologize to any correspondents who may be fuming over our non-response. 'Tis not intentional.) Add to that the fact that we are reading not just one but two terribly, terribly edited editions -- Dickens' The Old Curiosity Shop (which isn't a very good novel anyway, we must point out) courtesy of Penguin, and Love's Labors Lost courtesy of the Oxford Shakespeare -- and we feel on the verge of losing our mind.

Thus, to provide ourself some sort of comfort, we recently blasted through Caroline Alexander's attractively produced The Endurance: Shackleton's Legendary Antarctic Expedition. There we repeatedly ran across the word hoosh, which any student of polar expeditions -- which we are not -- should know well. In one of her early uses of the word, Alexander defines it thus: "At 5:30, penguin stew ('hoosh') was served with cocoa, and immediately afterward the crew settled into their sleeping bags." But hoosh is not just penguin stew per se: it is instead any sort of stew.

Kind of. We also learn, for example, that

The staple of their diet was "hoosh," a brick of beef protein, lard, oatmeal, sugar, and salt originally intended as sledging rations for the transcontinental trek that now lay on the fringe of memory. Mixed with water, hoosh made a thick stew over which the coveted Nut Food could be crumbled.

Thus stew seems to be something made from hoosh.

We also get another form later in Alexander's account: "At 12:45, most of the men turned in for 'hoosh oh,' a lunch of boiled seal's backbone, while Marston and Hurley remained outside, shelling limpets."

We hardly expect linguistic purity from men stranded for months in and around Antarctica, but this migration of the word -- so that it almost seems a general term for the dull, repetitive fare the men were eating -- strikes us as intriguing. The OED, though, will have nothing of this migration: it defines the term only as "a kind of thick soup," with two citations from Scott (1905, 1911), one from Shackleton (1919), and one from Chamber's Journal (1922). The OED draws its definition from Scott's first use, when he mentions that the cook "proceeded to prepare the ingredients of the hoosh, by which term the hot, thick soup that constituted the sledging meal was generally known."

The OED also remains mum on the issue of etymology: the noun's origins are unknown, the dictionary claims. Thus we had to peer into the definitions for the verb and interjection forms of hoosh, which both have to do with driving cattle and other farm animals. One can yell "Hoosh!" into the barnyard, as Hardy proves in Far from the Madding Crowd (1874): "Saying ‘Hoosh!’ to the cocks and hens when they go upon your seeds." (That, perversely, is only one of two usage examples for the interjection.) But one more typically hooshes one's cows or sheep. Or one's Eeyore, evidently: the longest citation for this definition comes from Milne's 1928 House at Pooh Corner. Milne rests cheek by jowl with Joyce, appropriately enough: in Finnegan's Wake, we get the delightful "Trust her to propagate the species and hoosh her fluffballs safe through din and danger!"

Hoosh also seems a word where the first printed form must lag centuries behind its verbal use: the OED's first citation comes only from 1908.

So what about the etymology here? The OED claims the verb comes from the interjection, then hooshes us off to compare shoo. That interjection has a fascinatingly long history: the OED finds a first use in 1483, then a number from the 17c. The 18c seems to have forgotten the word, but the 19c used it with reckless abandon. This is "an instinctive exclamation," the etymology insists; it then asks us to ponder several German forms of schu, the French shou, and the Italian scioia. Should hoosh, then, simply be considered a reverse-spelling variant of shoo?

We were also intrigued to see that hooshtah -- identified only as an echoic word -- has been restricted to camel-driving by the OED. This is another word that seems to come into printed use in the early twentieth century: the first comes from 1903, when an R. Bedford observed that "Their string of five camels...were water-swollen, so that they looked like five great footballs set up on sticks. One by one Quinn and Lawler ‘hooshta'ed’ them to the ground." Ah, such an image.

But all of this roundabout musing gets us no closer to the foodstuff hoosh. We can understand why, for example, hoosh was adapted by the RAF during WW2 to describe a fast landing, as the OED points out with a 1943 citation. But how did this word enter that narrow world of polar exploration? We suppose we might as well start speculating about the origins of Hoosier, yet another adjacent word in the OED...