Hoosier

As an Indiana native and resident, I thought I'd start with a discussion of a term that most of us who live here see or hear on at least a weekly basis: Hoosier.

In the most widely understood sense, "Hoosier" refers to a native of Indiana. Most of us here don't affix any sort of pejorative meaning to the term, although I came from the northwest part of the state, where very few people refer to themselves as Hoosiers or even use the term. I suppose this is so because Northwest Indiana residents typically think of themselves as Chicagoans, not Indiana folk.

But in the rest of the state, the word is used pretty frequently. Indiana University sports teams are called the Hoosiers. The state lottery isn't called the Indiana Lottery; it's called the Hoosier Lottery. Before the age of corporate naming rights for sporting facilities, the RCA Dome was known as the Hoosier Dome. Rock Bottom Brewery even offers a beer called Hoosier Ma Stout, the logo for which is a quaint picture of a frontier couple standing in front of a log cabin. And before the Indiana high school basketball tournament was divided into a class tournament, the single-class tournament was often referred to as Hoosier Hysteria.

I have heard the term used as a slight a few times. When Bob Knight was coach of the IU basketball team, he became angry (surprise, right?) when Northwestern fans taunted the coach by asking him, "Hoosier daddy?" And when I was in Southern California to visit a friend a few years ago, we were called "f***ing Hoosiers" by a drunk patron in a Santa Barbara bar. This incident was unusual because the guy had no idea we were Indiana natives, unlike the taunting Northwestern students, who knew that the coach was connected with IU.

All sources note that the history of "Hoosier" is a cloudy one. According to the OED, the word has been used since the late 1820's. However, no one has been able to pinpoint the true genesis of the word. Explanations range from the facetious to the serious. On the serious side, here's the American Heritage Dictionary's etymology of "Hoosier":

[T]he most likely possibility is that the term is an alteration of hoozer, an English dialect word recorded in Cumberland, a former county of northwest England, in the late 19th century and used to refer to anything unusually large. The transition between hoozer and Hoosier is not clear.

On the facetious side, here's an excerpt from an article that appeared in the July/August 1992 edition of Indiana Alumni Magazine, in which author Diane Carmony describes the etymology of the word through the eyes of Indiana poet James Whitcomb Riley:

Hoosier pioneers fought so violently, Riley contended, that noses were bitten off and eyes jabbed out during these brawls. "Hoosier," said Riley, descends from the question posed by a stranger after entering a southern Indiana tavern and pushing a piece of human flesh with his boot toe: "Who's ear?"

So how about it, Indiana natives? Do you proudly refer to yourselves as "Hoosiers"?

Sources:

• The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (4th ed. 2000).
• Diane Carmony, What's a Hoosier?, Indiana Alumni Magazine (July/August 1992).
• The Oxford English Dictionary.