Much hubbub about very little

Soon after the blog Oxford Etymologist came into existence on March 1, 2006 (more than twenty years ago!), I wrote a post on the word hubba-hubba (in those days, I was told not to exceed one page of text, and of course, there were no illustrations). Numerous comments followed. Some time later (on November 22, 2006), my topic was hullabaloo, and again multiple comments rewarded my modest effort. In those days, a stream of responses established a close tie between my readers and me (hence the now defunct section “Monthly Gleanings”). Though I have no idea why that stream has dried up, today even a single comment makes me happy, for “he who is not satisfied with a little is satisfied with nothing.” Perhaps I should stick to the letter H. Anyway, I decided to woo my fickle luck again and will now add hubbub (see the image gracing the title) to that ancient series.

Exclamations, interjections, and war cries are usually hard to trace to their origins. Oops, upsy-daisy, drat, hurrah, hello, hi, and their likes look natural to speakers but not to language historians. Even oh and ah have nontrivial origins, because when people are in pain or are genuinely surprised, they do not emit such genteel “vocalic gestures”: they scream. Hubbub is of course not an interjection, but it makes one think of hullabaloo and other “emotional” H– words denoting noise. We can also remember hoopla and the bird name hoopoo ~ hoopoe.

I usually avoid  discussing nouns, adjectives, and verbs whose detailed and often transparent origin can be found online or in any good dictionary. Yet the amount of information varies from work to work. Though hubbub seems to be a case in point (nothing new, and nothing to write about), this is an illusion. All sources say approximately but not quite the same thing and not enough. Here is the etymological part of the entry hubbub from The Century Dictionary (though this monumental reference work is seldom consulted today, I treat it with great respect): “Formerly also hobub, hooboob, also whoobub (apparently, simulating whopp, hoop); also extended or reduplicated hubbub–boo, hubbleshow, hubble-shubble—words showing imitative variation of a base *hub, probably of interjectional origin, but perhaps in part of hoop, shout.” An asterisk denotes a reconstructed form.

This is all very true. However, there is a hitch in dealing with that entry. Compare the information from the last edition of Walter W. Skeat’s An Etymological Dictionary of the English Language, 1911: “Imitative. Cf. Gaelic ub, interjection of aversion. Formerly also whoobub, a confused noise. Hubbub was confused with hoop-hoop, reduplication of hoop; and whoobub with whoop-hoop.” (Many years earlier, Skeat suggested that perhaps the source of hubbub was indeed whoop-whoop.) Surprisingly, The Century Dictionary does not mention Gaelic, and Skeat, who begins (!) with Gaelic, uses only the irritating word cf., that is, confer, compare. Old dictionaries often tell us to “compare” different forms. How are we supposed to do it?

The volume of the OED with the letter H appeared in 1901, and the entry on hubbub rather cautiously suggested the Irish (that is, Gaelic) origin of the English word, but the second edition of The Century Dictionary ignored this tip. By contrast, The Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology (1966), derived from the OED, states unhesitatingly: “Of Irish origin .” It then cites a few (irrelevant?) Irish words for disgust and amazement, but the alleged source is supposed to be the battle cry. Can interjections be borrowed? Yes, indeed. The bookish word alas is from Old French. Oh goes back to Latin, via Old French. So does ah, a truly international word. Upsy-daisy is from Dutch.

Hubbub, its history and etymology, attracted a good deal of attention in the nineteenth-century popular press (as usual, in Notes and Queries). The most curious analogy takes us to hubbub,a game like dice, played at one time by some Native Americans. Here is a passage from the book by Henry Spelman Relation of Virginia (1613; I have modernized the spelling): “Drums and trumpets they have none, but when they will gather themselves together, they have a kind of howling or whopub, so differing in sound one from the other as both part (sic) very easily be distinguished.” The earliest example of English hubbub from a text in the OED goes back to 1555.

The ship Pilgrim arrived in America in 1620. By that time, hubbub had become widely known in England. Even Shakespeare used it, though he spelled the word as who-bub. Speelman may have identified the native word with the one he had known at home. But this is unlikely. William Wood in New England’s Prospect (1634) described hubbub as a game resembling dice (“…smiting themselves on the breast and thighs, crying out, Hub, Hub, Hub!”). English hubbub is certainly not from Algonquin, but the coincidence is striking. Similar words have been found in some other languages. For instance, in 1904, a report from Egypt mentioned habub “a dust storm of considerable extent.” Hubbub is, most certainly, an onomatopoeia that could have originated almost anywhere at any time. The question is whether the English word is native or borrowed and, if borrowed, then from where.

Thanks to the excellent research of two scholars, David Greene and Alan Bliss, we know a good deal about the history of hubbub. The seemingly plausible suggestion that hubbub is from French, rather than from Irish, should be discarded. But surprisingly, the Irish form is from English! The source of hubbub must have been the Middle English adverb abo “above,” pronounced as aboo. This pronunciation has been recorded even in some archaic eighteenth-century British dialects. The etymon of hubbub seems to have been some war cries like Irish ub! ub! ubub!

But this reconstruction leaves out the origin of initial h in hubbub. Though the history of this h is unclear, we should note that the earliest form of hubbub, recorded by the OED, has the spelling whobub. Similar spellings were common in the sixteenth century and some time later. As Alan Bliss explained, the story may or even must have begun with fubbub, whose f became voiceless hw (as in the pronunciation of those who say what, which, why with voiceless hw) and later h. Details would take us too far afield. All we have to know is that, most probably, hubbub originated in Early English, was taken over by the Irish, and later returned to English. Not unexpectedly, the word changed its pronunciation more than once along the way. To us this itinerary is full of gaps, and we are left wondering why in the sixteenth century the word was reborrowed into Early Modern English. However, something about this itinerary has been traced with a good deal of certainty, so that hubbub is not “a word of unknown origin,” which is good. Thus, after all, our ado (hubbub) was not about nothing.

P.S. Thank you for the comment on sorrow. The alleged tie between the Hittite and the Germanic words is curious, but of course, its existence cannot be demonstrated, unless both forms are sound-imitative.

_{Featured image: Photo by Joe Van. CC-BY-2.0 via Flickr.}