Sean Whooley lives in Swords and he would like to know whether his West Cork surname, which in Irish (O hUallaigh) means haughty, vain, boastful, is in any way connected to hooley and hooligan.
God forfend! The origin of both hooley and hooligan is unascertained, according to Oxford. Hooley first appeared in print in Bartlett's Dictionary of American English in 1877 spelt huly, and described as a noise, an uproar. It also gives the phrase "to raise huly".
Many's the time I've heard that this hooley gave rise to hooligan, but this notion is based on folk-etymology, which says that London police court reports of 1898 refer to Hooley's Gang; unfortunately no positive confirmation of this has been discovered.
In a Daily News item printed in August 8th, 1898, there is, "the constable said the prisoner belonged to a gang of rough youths calling themselves Hooligans". But this harmless gang may have taken its name either from a music hall song of 1880 which described the doings of a rowdy Irish family, the Hooligans, or from a character of the name which appeared in a series of adventures in Funny Folks, a popular journal of the day.
An earlier citation gives a farce by T.G. Rodwell, first performed in 1824, and called More Blunders Than One, which featured a drunken Irish butler named Larry O'Hoolagan, whose name in Irish would have been O hUallachain.
Better to side with Oxford and say that both hooley and hooligan are of uncertain lineage. By the way, I'm told that the US naval ratings refer to their friends, the Coast Guards, as "the hooligan navy", and the term has also been noted in Russian as khooligan, with reference to the thugs who perpetrated the Kishineff slaughter of the Jews.
A child who is being reprimanded by its mother for giving back-answers is told, "I don't want any snash from you." A reader from Woodford Park, Templeogue, who hails from the North, inquires about this snash.
Burns has it in Twa Dogs: "How they maun thole a factor's snash", but the word is found all over the North. Macmanus from Donegal has it in his 1895 novel, The Bend of the Road: "I doubt if they'll put up with your snash elsewhere."
An imitative word, this. Compare the West Frisian snasje and the Swedish snaska, in the sense of to bite at, hastily and noisily.
The Words We Use 3, a new collection of this column, has just been published by Four Courts Press at £6.95.