hodad

Ad for the soundtrack from the 1963 film Beach Party, starring Annette Funicello and Frankie Avalon

11 May 2026

Hodad is surfing jargon. Exactly what it means has shifted a bit. It started out as a deprecatory term for non-surfers, but it quickly shifted to become a general term of opprobrium.

The origin of the term, like that of many slang terms, is unknown. J. E. Lighter’s Historical Dictionary of American Slang offers up the possibility that it may be from the greeting Ho! Dad, or that it is a variation on hodag, an imaginary monster. This latter suggestion is rather unlikely as hodags prowl the wilds of Wisconsin, not the beaches of California where hodads make their first appearance. Another possibility is that Hodad is a surname, and the term may have originated with one particular annoying person. But the origin is probably lost in time, never to be known.

The earliest instance in print that I have found is in the Long Beach, California Independent of 9 May 1960:

At this time of the year on the beach, it is very hard to tell a mere tourist from a ho-dad or even a surfer. The sun has been away, and everyone is white and untanned. Howsoever, the surfers have crew cuts. Some of them bleach their hair with peroxide. They will be sitting on their foam boards out a ways, waiting for the big ones. The ho-dads have long hair with lots of gunk on it. They will be horsing around on the beach, trying to impress the girls. They do not like to get wet, ho-dads don’t.

The tourists? they stare at the girls just like the ho-dads do, only they let their mouths hang open. They also kick sand when they walk. They don’t mean to, but they can’t help it.

And another early use is this from Omaha’s Sunday World-Herald of 16 July 1961. Don’t let the paper’s location fool you, the article is about California surf culture:

One girl explained recently that there are three groups in high school: The surfers, the ho-dads, and the socs.

The ho-dads, also known as ho-daddies, are the hot-rod and car-club enthusiasts. They like well-oiled, Elvis Presley-type pompadours, wear boots, jeans or pegged slacks, drive cars with souped-up motors and go for rock n’ roll.

The socs (pronounced, for some tribalistic reason, as so-cees) are the “society types”—the ones who belong to campus clubs and get good grades. Surfers and ho-dads have another name for them: “Kooks.”

The Oxford English Dictionary’s earliest citation shows that surfers had quickly carried hodad around the world as it’s from Australian Women’s Weekly of 24 October 1962:

HO-DAD: Anyone who annoys board-riders while they surf.

And this one from the Dallas Morning News of 13 March 1963 uses hodad without definition or quotation marks. It’s still being hyphenated, though:

But to a true Surfer, or even a Gremmie or Ho-Dad, paradise would not be complete without Dick Dale and his Surfers’ Stomp.

And this one from the Miami Herald of 23 April 1963 expands the definition beyond that of non-surfer, encompassing dilettantes of the sport:

To give you an idea, in the future if you want to designate someone as the lowest form of pond life, just call him a hodad. Among surfers, hodads are looked on with considerable distaste because of their wild antics and lack of dedication to the sport.

And I could not leave hodad behind without including this rather unusual classified ad that appeared in the Trenton Evening Times in September 1963. It’s for a drive-in theater in neighboring Lawrenceville, New Jersey (sadly, the theater is no longer in existence) and coincides with the release of the film Beach Party, starring Annette Funicello and Frankie Avalon, which is often credited with kicking off the genre of beach party films:

ATTENTION GREMMIES AND BEACH BUNNIES—Don’t be a hodad kook, let a hotdogger show up those goofy foots and pearl divers, bring your tag-along and do some hotdogging yourself, don’t worry, you won’t bail out or bomb, the worst thing that can happen is to catch a rail, you might go over the falls or even pearl, one thing sure, you’ll shoot the curl when you finally go angling, you’ll agree with the hotdoggers that his thing called surfing is really glassy. Call the Lawrence Drive-In Theater at TU 2-9700 and find out the glassiest, the most stoke movie ever, it’s a real cowabunga.

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Sources:

Classified ad. Trenton Evening Times (New Jersey), 3 September 1963, 21/5. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Dictionary of American Regional English, vol. 2. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1991, s.v. hodag, n2.

Green’s Dictionary of Slang, accessed 19 April 2026, s.v. hodad, n.

Lighter, J. E. Historical Dictionary of American Slang, vol. 2 of 2. New York: Random House, 1997, s.v. hodad, n.

Oxford English Dictionary Online, 1976, s.v. hodad, n.

Roe, Dorothy. “STOMP: The Dance for Surf-Mad Teens.” Dallas Morning News (Texas), 13 March 1963, 2—Section 3/1. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

“Surfing Lingo.” Miami Herald (Florida), 23 April 1963, 3/1. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Torgeson, Dial. “They’re Dedicated to Fun-in-the-Sun.” Sunday World-Herald (Omaha, Nebraska), 16 July 1961, G2/4. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Wells, Bob. “Eye Opener: Plus Long Weekends.” Independent (Long Beach, California), 9 May 1960, A-3/2. Newspapers.com.

Yates, Kerry. “Surf-Riders’ Dictionary.” Australian Women’s Weekly, 24 October 1962, Teenager’s Weekly 3/2. National Library of Australia: Trove.

Image credit: Buena Vista Records, 1963. Wikimedia Commons. Public domain image.

religion

Detail from an early fourteenth-century manuscript

6 May 2026
(Update: 8 May 2026, added discussion of classical Latin root)

Religion has a straightforward etymology, but its original English meaning is rather different from how it is commonly used today. It is a late twelfth-century borrowing, partly from the Anglo-Norman religiun, and partly from the post-classical Latin religio, both referring to a system of beliefs about divine beings.

In classical Latin, religio had a range of meanings relating to the divine. It could refer to reverence for the gods; conscientiousness or scrupulousness, especially in matters of faith; or the more abstract holiness or sanctity. The root appears to be lig-, meaning to bind. The verb religo (not to be confused with the noun religio discussed above) means to fasten up or bind fast. Cicero, probably reflecting the prevalent view of his time, argued that the root was the verb relegare, meaning to read again, but modern scholarship generally discounts this explanation. (As a rule, present-day scholars have more resources and knowledge of language development than those living in earlier eras.) But either way, the noun religio was associated with the idea of adherence to divine rites..

Its original English sense was that of a monastic order, and it could also refer to a member of such an order, a monk, nun, canon, or friar or even a small community of such people.

The earliest surviving appearance of the word in English is from the Ancrene Wisse (or Ancrene Riwle), a handbook for anchoresses, women who withdrew from society, even monastic society, opting to live alone in cells attached to churches where they led a life of intense prayer and devotion. The Ancrene Riwle was probably composed in the late twelfth century, with the earliest surviving manuscript from c. 1230:

Rihten hire & smeðin hire is of euch religiun ant of euch ordre the goð & al þe strengðe. þeos riwle is imaket nawt of monnes fundles, a is of godes heaste.

(The goodness and strength of each religion and each order is to govern her & to smooth her [i.e., keep her heart free of sin]. This rule is not made of man’s invention, but it is of God’s instruction.)

We don’t see religion used in the abstract sense until the late fourteenth century. That sense appears in a Wycliffite translation of the Latin Vulgate Bible from c. 1384. Colossians 2:20–23 reads, in part:

For if ȝe ben deed with Crist from the elementis of this world, what ȝit as men lyuynge to the world deman ȝe? That ȝe touche not, nether taaste, nether trete with hoondis tho thingis, whiche alle ben in to deth bi the ilke vss, aftir the comaundementis and the techingis of men; whiche han a resoun of wisdom in veyn religioun and mekenesse.

(For if you are dead with Christ from the elements of this world, why do you, as if you were men living in the world, submit to them? That you do not touch, neither taste, nor treat with your hands those things, which all lead to death with such use, according to the commandments and the teachings of men, which have a foundation of wisdom in vain religion and humility.)

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Sources:

Ancrene Wisse. Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 402. Stanford University Libraries: Parker on the Web.

Ancrene Wisse. J. R. R. Tolkien, ed.  Early English Text Society 249. London: Oxford UP, 1962, 7. Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 402. Archive.org.

Anglo-Norman Dictionary, AND Phase 5, 2018–21, s.v. religiun, n.

Dictionary of Medieval Latin from British Sources, 2013, s.v. religio, n. Brepols: Database of Latin Dictionaries.

The Holy Bible Containing the Old and New Testaments with the Apocryphal Books in the Earliest English Versions made from the Latin Vulgate by John Wycliffe and His Followers, vol. 4. Josiah Forsall and Frederic Madden, eds. Oxford, Oxford UP, 1850, 433/2. HathiTrust Digital Library.

Lewis, Charlton T. and Charles Short. A Latin Dictionary. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1879, s.v. religio, n., religo, v. Brepols: Database of Latin Dictionaries.

Middle English Dictionary, 31 January 2026, s.v. religioun, n.

Oxford English Dictionary Online, December 2009, s.v. religion, n.

Image credit: Unknown artist, first quarter of the fourteenth century. London, British Library, Stowe MS 17, fol. 191r. Wikimedia Commons. Public domain image.

English (spin)

Mark Twain and his biographer Albert Bigelow Paine playing billiards, 1907

4 May 2026

In billiards, and in other sports, to put English on a ball is to cause it to spin so that it’s course changes. In billiards, this is done by striking the ball on one side, and the course change often occurs after it caroms off the cushion. The term arose in the United States in the mid nineteenth century.

Why this is referred to as English is not known. The most likely explanation is that billiard players from England introduced the technique to those in the United States, but there is no firm evidence of this. The Oxford English Dictionary has a quotation from a 1959 letter written to London’s Sunday Times in claiming that it was a man named English who introduced the technique to the Americas, but this is almost certainly an after-the-fact invention to explain the term.

The earliest use of English in this sense that I’m aware of is in the Cleveland Daily Plain Dealer of 14 October 1861:

The following are tricks most frequently practiced at billiards by a cunning adversary, of which I desire to warn you:

[…]

3. Immediately after shooting using his cue as a magic wand and flourishing it in the air above the table to give an increased “English” to his ball.

And Mark Twain used the term in his 1869 Innocents Abroad in a description of Parisian pool halls:

The cushions were hard and inelastic, and the cues were so crooked that in making a shot you had to allow for the curve or you would infallibly put the “English” on the wrong side of the ball.

And English as a verb appears in the Atlanta Constitution of 31 January 1875 in an article about King Kalakaua of Hawaii playing billiards in Omaha, Nebraska:

His royal highness again scored several, and to make up for his miscue he “jawed” the balls, and would and would [sic] have made a big run had not the balls “shewed” round so that it was impossible to make the shot without going to cushion first, and “Englishing.” The king failed on his “English,” not putting enough of it on.

The Constitution credits this article to the Omaha Bee, but that paper’s digitization is spotty, with only two issues of the Omaha paper from January 1875 available. In those, I see coverage of the king’s visit to the city, but not of this particular event.

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Sources:

“Kalakaua as a Billiard Player. Atlanta Constitution (Georgia), 31 January 1875, 2/5. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

Oxford English Dictionary Online, December 2008, s.v. English, adj. (& adv.) & n., English, v.

Smith, Norman. “Giving It English.” Sunday Times (London), 5 April 1959, 4/3. Gale Primary Sources: The Sunday Times.

“Tricks at Billiards.” Cleveland Daily Plain Dealer (Ohio), 14 October 1861, 4/3. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Twain, Mark. The Innocents Abroad. San Francisco: H. H. Bancroft, 1869, 116. HathiTrust Digital Library.

Photo credit: Unknown photographer, 1907. Wikimedia Commons. From Paine, Albert Bigelow. Mark Twain: A Biography, vol. 4 of 4. New York: Gabriel Wells, 1923, facing page 1326. Archive.org. Public domain image.

eighty-six

Publicity still of Don Adams as Agent 86 and Barbara Feldon as Agent 99 in the TV series Get Smart

2 May 2026

Eighty-six or 86 originated in restaurant slang with the meaning that an item was out of stock. It also came into use as a verb meaning to cancel an order and to eject or not serve a customer. It then passed into general slang to mean to cancel something or kill someone. Why the number eighty-six was chosen is not known. There are number of explanations floating about, but only two are plausible: that it is rhyming slang or that it is simply an arbitrary assignment of a number in a larger numbering scheme.

Use of eighty-six in diner slang meaning out of stock is recorded as early as 1920 in a 22 October article in the Topeka Daily State Journal:

They were breaking in a new waiter at one of the avenue restaurants. He turned in an order for a small steak, to be met with a curt “eighty-six.” The waiter stared at the cook and repeated the order. “Eighty-six, I toldcha,” roared the cook in so belligerent a tone that the waiter wilted. A brother hash-slinger broke it gently to him that in the argot of the restaurant “Eighty-six” means just what “Thirty” does to a printer—“That’s all. No more to come.”

Several years later, George Manker Watters and Arthur Hopkins’s 1927 play Burlesque contains an exchange where a waiter uses eighty-six, but it seems to be in the opposite sense, that of possessing something in short supply, specifically during Prohibition:

WAITER (opening bottles)—If you need any Scotch or gin, sir.
SKID—Yeah, I know.
WAITER—My number is Eighty-six.
SKID—That’s just Lefty’s age.
LEFTY (stirring in his doze—Ah, you big bum, why don’t you go to bed?
SKID (pays WAITER)—Keep the change.
WAITER—Thank you, sir. Thank you very much, and my number is…
SKID (up at table)—Yeah. Eighty-six. I know (WAITER exits. SKID draws enormous flask from pocket.) Do you want yours straight or highball, Mazie?

Researcher Barry Popik has found two other early uses. The first is in a 10 June 1929 Pittsburgh Post-Gazette article:

The Soda Jerkers’ Code

The young bartenders in one of those big soda emporiums downtown have a secret code. They use it in relaying orders behind the bar. It works much like the waitress’ “Two on a raft!” when she means poached eggs on toast.

When “Burn one!” for instance, is hollered fore and aft, it means the customer’s tongue is hanging out for a chocolate malted milk. Other signals we learned to identify at the rist of indigestion and strawberry rash are:

“Shake one!” (Chocolate milk shake.)
“Shoot one!” (Small coca cola.)
“Stretch one!” (Large coca cola.)
“Ten!” (Root beer.)
“Twenty-one!” (Limeade.)
“Thirty-one!” (Lemonade.)
“Forty-one!” (Orangeade.)
“Fifty-one! (Hot chocolate.)
“Eighty-six! (All out.)
“Eighty-nine!” (Look at the legs under the table.)

The second is in a Walter Winchell newspaper column from 23 May 1933 with a nationwide audience:

A Hollywood soda-jerker forwards this glossary of soda-fountain lingo out there... “Shoot one” and Draw one” is one coke and one coffee... “Shoot one in the red!” means a cherry coke... An “echo” is a repeat order... “Eighty-six” means all out of it... “Eighty-one” is a glass of water... “Thirteen” means one of the big bosses is drifting around... A “red ball” is an orangeade.

By 1947 eighty-six had become a verb meaning to cancel, as can be seen by this item in the 5 February 1947 issue of Variety—a publication famed for its use of slangy headlines—which also shows the term had moved beyond the food service industry:

Jeffries Eighty-Sixed?

Hollywood, Feb. 4.

Disk jockeys test their weight tonight when vocalist, Herb Jeffries, is named initial candidate for jockey’s nix list. He failed to show as promised to substitute for Bob McLaughlin, ill, on pilot’s daily show over KLAC, here. McLaughlin will ask his fellows to play no more Jeffries platters, and has had it indicated by organization sparkers, Bill Anson and Peter Potter that they’ll press the measure at regular meeting tonight.

And by 1978, the meaning of the verb had was also in use to mean to kill a person, as can be seen in this 15 March 1978 Los Angeles Times article about a left-wing activist who had been believed dead turning up alive and well and married to an undercover policewoman:

When later informed by a reporter that official records showed Dial and Miss Milazzo were married, Wells, one of his closest friends’ [sic] expressed mild surprise.

“At least it suggests that the police haven’t 86ed (disposed of) him,” Wells said. “But it still doesn’t resolve the question of whether he was a cop. We’d all like to know.

Various explanations have been put forward for the term. The most plausible is that it is rhyming slang for nix. The only issue with this explanation is the existence of a more comprehensive numbering scheme, as evidenced by the 1929 and 1933 citations. The larger scheme suggests the assignment of this meaning to eighty-six is arbitrary.

Most of the other proffered explanations aren’t worth discussing as there is no evidence to support them, but there is one that comes up so frequently that it needs to be mentioned. This explanation holds that eighty-six comes from Chumley’s Bar at 86 Bedford Street in Manhattan. Chumley’s opened as a Prohibition-era speakeasy in 1922—two years after eighty-six is recorded in print—and closed its doors for the last time in 2020, a victim of the Covid-19 pandemic. The explanation is clearly an after-the-fact attempt to make sense of an arcane term.

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Sources:

Danver, Charles F. “Pittsburghesque.” Pittsburgh Post-Gazette,” 10 June 1929, 8/6. Newspapers.com.

Green’s Dictionary of Slang, accessed 2 May 2026, s.v. eighty-six, adj., eighty-six, v.

“Jeffries Eighty-Sixed?” Variety, 5 February 1947, 46. ProQuest.

Lighter, J. E. Historical Dictionary of American Slang, vol. 1 of 2. New York: Random House: 1994, s.v. eighty-six.

Oxford English Dictionary Online, 1989 (modified June 2025), s.v. eighty-six, n.

Popik, Barry (@barrypopik.bsky.social), Bluesky, 1 May 2026.

Rosenzweig, Dave. “Vanished Leftist Believed Allive, Wed.” Los Angeles Times, 15 March 1978, 1, 26/3. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

“Snap Shots.” Topeka Daily State Journal (Kansas), 22 October 1920, 6/4. Library of Congress: Chronicling America.

Watters, George Manker and Arthur Hopkins. Burlesque (1927). In Burns Mantle, ed. The Best Plays of 1927–28. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1928, Act 2, 122–45 at 135. Archive.org.

Winchell, Walter. “On Broadway” (syndicated column). Times-Union (Albany, New York), 23 May 1933, 8. NewsBank: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Image credit: NBC Television, 1965. Wikimedia Commons. Public domain image.

hokum

“The Melodrama,” Honoré Daumier, c. 1858, oil on canvas

1 May 2026

Hokum is a slang term with two main senses. One is something that is overly sentimental or melodramatic; the other is nonsense, something that is false. Like most slang terms, its origin is a bit mysterious, but the most likely explanation is that it is a blend of hocus pocus and bunkum.

Hokum arises in American theater slang in the opening years of the twentieth century. We see the sentimental sense in the pages of New York’s Evening World of 3 March 1906:

No, I ain’t going out in a musical show. Musical shows are dead cards and you have to carry too many people. I’ve been studying plays that make hits and I’m going to write one myself that won’t be nothing but sure-fire hokum from start to finish.

And we see the false sense of hokum a couple of years later. From Kenneth McGaffey’s 1908 The Sorrows of a Show Girl:

Honest, to hear him spring that sure-fire hokum you would have thought he believed it. I know he passed the same line of dope out to me, and I fell for it.

Since the appearances in print are so close to one another and that the term was undoubtedly in oral use for some time before this, we can’t say which sense came first. They probably arose in tandem, as overly sentimental and nonsense aren’t all that much different from one another.

The adjective hokey and the term hokey-pokey, which has a plethora of meanings, probably influenced the development and use of hokum, but an exploration of those terms will be explored in a forthcoming entry. Hokey is too much work to take on all at once.

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Sources:

Green’s Dictionary of Slang, accessed 13 April 2026, s.v. hokum, n., hokum, adj., hokey, adj.

McCardell, Roy L. “The Chorus Girl.” Evening World (New York), 3 March 1906, 9/4. Library of Congress: Chronicling America.

McGaffey, Kenneth. The Sorrows of a Show Girl. Chicago: J. I. Austen, 1908, 214. Archive.org.

Oxford English Dictionary Online, 1933, s.v. hokum, n.; 1976, s.v. hokey, adj.

Image credit: Honoré Daumier, c. 1858. Wikimedia Commons. Public domain image.