Wahoos
From Free net encyclopedia
- For other uses, see Wahoo (disambiguation).
Wahoos, or Hoos for short, is an unofficial nickname for sports teams of the University of Virginia, officially referred to as the Cavaliers.
The nickname is a back-formation from the school's yell, "wah-hoo-wah." The yell was invented as an Indian yell by Dartmouth College student Daniel Rollins in 1878. Corks & Curls, the University of Virginia annual, regularly printed lists of the yells and colors of the various colleges; in 1888 it included Dartmouth's school yell, a part of which was the phrase "wah-hoo-wah." University of Virginia students soon incorporated the phrase "wah-hoo-wah" into their own, longer school yell, and individual U.Va. fraternities also adopted it and modified it. (It was common for "student culture" to travel: the University of Illinois also adopted "wah-hoo-wah," and the tune of the Yale "Boola Boola", for example, became the basis of the "Boomer-Sooner" song of the University of Oklahoma.)
By the time singer Natalie Floyd Otey performed in Charlottesville on January 30, 1893, students in the audience had been yelling "wah-hoo-wah" for years. One of her songs was specifically about the school and was titled "Wah-Hoo-Wah." It began "Oh, Charlottesville, illustrious name,/ The home of Jefferson you claim;/ The lap of learning, font of fame—" and was set to the tune of "Ta-rara-boom-de-ay," with the catchy chorus sung as "Wah-hoo-wah you-vee-ay."
Otey's song was popular enough with students that Corks & Curls printed it in 1894, and students wrote their own verse about how they enjoyed singing and yelling the phrase "wah-hoo-wah": "The good old song of Wah-hoo-wah, / We’ll sing it o’er and o’er, / It cheers the heart and warms the blood / To yell and shout and roar." Taking its title from its first line, that song about the Indian yell later became the official song of the school.
Official University of Virginia sports documents explain that Washington and Lee baseball fans first called U.Va. players "a bunch of rowdy Wahoos" during the in-state baseball rivalry in the 1890s, presumably after hearing them yell or sing "wah-hoo-wah." The term "Wahoos" caught on around the University and was commonly in use by the 1940s. "'Hoos" became the more accepted nickname throughout Grounds in student publications. In recent years, the Hoos nickname has become the sole nickname used by students and recent alumni of the University, and it is also commonly used in the media in reference to U.Va. sports teams. (Dartmouth students, meanwhile, largely stopped using the Indian yell during the 1980s along with the accompanying Indian mascots, symbols, and nickname.)
Other implausible but popular theories of the origin of the nickname at U.Va. involve the wahoo fish, supposedly known for drinking copious amounts of water without drowning in order to puff itself up for a fight.