A couple of days ago I walked into my bedroom to find Gus, my one-year-old cavapoo, standing on my bed (which he’s not supposed to get on), having emptied the washing basket all over the bedroom. After failing to tell him off (because he’s literally the cutest dog in the world ever, even when he’s got my one nice bra in his mouth), I half-heartedly called him a ‘hooligan’. Which got me thinking… where does the word ‘hooligan’ come from?
I’ve found three origin stories for ‘hooligan’ all of which might be apocryphal (i.e. bollocks). The first is that it comes from the Irish surname Houlihan, which was used as a byword for hell-raising Irishmen in musichall songs on the late 1900s. The second is that it’s named for Patrick Houlihan, one of the aforementioned hell-raising Irishmen (sorry Ireland). He was a small-time crook who died in prison in London (Southwark to be precise) after killing a policeman in a brawl.
The third theory, which is my favourite so probably not true (and doesn’t involve any Irish people), is that during the Jacobite rising of 1745 in Scotland (when Charles Edward Stuart attempted to regain the British throne for his father James Francis Edward Stuart – but I’m sure I don’t need to tell you that), a British officer was being eaten alive by midges (i.e. those bitey insects which ruin picnics and other outdoor activities, including several bike rides I did as a child where I accidentally rode through a cloud of them with my mouth open #neverforget). He misheard the Scots-Gaelic word for midge which is ‘meanbh-chuileagi’ as ‘midge hooligan’ and accidentally invented a new word which still survives today.
