hooch

[prettygoodword]

hooch or hootch - n., alcoholic liquor, especially inferior or bootleg liquor.


Dates to the late 1890s, shortening of hoochinoo, a distilled liquor made by Native Americans, originally specifically a rum-like liquor made in Hoochinoo / Hutsnuwu, a Tlingit village on Admiralty Island, Alaska, from Tlingit Xucnu·wú (also spelled Xutsnuuwú), literally Grizzly Bear Fort, from xú·c grizzly bear + nu·w, fortified place, and yes I want to hear all the stories about how it got that name. The Tlingit peoples, with hundreds of recognized tribes, inhabited the entire Alaska Panhandle and parts of British Columbia just inland of that, and speak a language related to Athabaskan languages.

[Sidebar: The other word spelled hooch, meaning a rough hut, started as Army slang in the Korean and Vietnam Wars, is an alteration of Japanese uchi, house.]

---L.

Comments

And once again you’ve made me look up a thing.

[full_metal_ox]

The term hoochie-coochie (subject to variation) turns out not to be etymologically related, although the venues where they were available sometimes overlapped.

The term seems not to have a single crunchy bite-sized origin story in any actual Middle Eastern, North African, Asian, or Romani word; its history is a deep dive down the rabbit warren and through a compost heap of vast and varied stuff that got scooped haphazardly into the Sexualized Exotic Otherlandia bin.

https://archive.ph/WtaNn

Re: And once again you’ve made me look up a thing.

[prettygoodword]

That is a rabbit hole. Whee!