It’s New Year’s Eve, and the atmosphere is one of hoopla… depending on what channel you’re tuned to, at least. If you choose to be at a party, there will be hooting and hollering and whooping it up, perhaps some woo girls (the ones who shout “WOO! PARTYYY! WOOOO!”), and maybe even a hula hoop.
OK, perhaps not a hula hoop, but if not, why not? The year is a ring around the sun, after all. The connecting point of the ring – the mouth of the ouroboros, as it were – is generally celebrated with much ado. And if you’re in Singapore, a request for a hula hoop sounds like a request for a hubbub: “Give me the hoop lah.” (And as I write this, it’s already the new year in Singapore.)
Why do we ring in the new year – the end and start of the year’s ring – with such hoopla? Any excuse for a party, and any chance to try to clean the slate, to be sure. But also just to get a leg up on it. To mount the steed of the times, or to jump the threshold, anyway. Because hoopla – influenced though it may have been in English by words such as whoop and hoot – quite possibly comes from French houp-là, which means, more or less, ‘upsadaisy’, as a thing you say to a human or beast. It might have spread into English on the basis of its being a thing you say to accompany or encourage sudden movement, and from that became a word for the sound of excited exclamations – cheering, jeering, or other clamour.
Well, it made the leap, one way or another. And it puts me in mind of a passage from Adolf Hitler – My Part in His Downfall, Spike Milligan’s memoir of soldierdom in World War II, wherein he recalls one Gunner Naze competing in a high-jump competition with little (no) preparation:
Came time for the jump off. An official signalled Naze and asked him if he was competing. Naze nodded. Naze walked twenty yards away, turned, and now saw that the officials had set the bar at five foot. For the first time he looked worried. He walked back a further fifty yards. He started his approach. The stadium fell quiet as the great athlete bounded across the grass. We all felt that something unusual was about to happen. On and on he came, making little clenching gestures with his hands . . . he reached the bar and with a triumphant shout of “Hoi Hup la!” and an almighty effort he hurled himself upwards. The bar broke across his forehead. Cheering broke out from the stands. Gunner Naze kept running, he left the field, he left the stadium, he left athletics.
May you enter the new year – without or without hoopla – with more success. It is a leap year, after all.
Sesquiotica 