Hip Hip Hooray - History

History

The call was recorded in England in the beginning of the 19th century in connection with making a toast.

It has been suggested that the word "hip" stems from a medieval Latin acronym, "Hierosolyma Est Perdita", meaning "Jerusalem is lost", a term that gained notoriety in the German Hep hep riots. English usage predates the riots, for example Thomas Moore wrote in his Memoirs that "they hipped and hurraed me" in 1818, a year before the riots, and The life of Pill Garlick (1813) likewise has a crowd toasting to the hero's health "with . . . hip! hip! hip! and a hoorra!".

Another claim is that the Europeans picked up the Mongol exclamation "hooray" as an enthusiastic cry of bravado and mutual encouragement, according to Jack Weatherford's book Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World.

Read more about this topic:  Hip Hip Hooray

Famous quotes containing the word history:

    The disadvantage of men not knowing the past is that they do not know the present. History is a hill or high point of vantage, from which alone men see the town in which they live or the age in which they are living.
    Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874–1936)

    One classic American landscape haunts all of American literature. It is a picture of Eden, perceived at the instant of history when corruption has just begun to set in. The serpent has shown his scaly head in the undergrowth. The apple gleams on the tree. The old drama of the Fall is ready to start all over again.
    Jonathan Raban (b. 1942)

    The history of work has been, in part, the history of the worker’s body. Production depended on what the body could accomplish with strength and skill. Techniques that improve output have been driven by a general desire to decrease the pain of labor as well as by employers’ intentions to escape dependency upon that knowledge which only the sentient laboring body could provide.
    Shoshana Zuboff (b. 1951)