Etymology
At the turn of the 20th century in Australia, the term "hoon" (and its rhyming slang version "silver spoon" and also "banana") had a different meaning: one who lived off immoral earnings (i.e. the proceeds of prostitution, a pimp or procurer of prostitutes).
Linguist Sid Baker in his book The Australian Language suggested that "hoon" (meaning "a fool") was a contraction of Houyhnhnm, a fictional race of intelligent horses which appears in Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift.
Hoon, when used in relation to people in motor vehicles (or associated with car culture), may be onomatopoeia. One may speak of a car, or its driver, or its occupants in general as "hooning down the road".
Read more about this topic: Hoon
Famous quotes containing the word etymology:
“Semantically, taste is rich and confusing, its etymology as odd and interesting as that of “style.” But while style—deriving from the stylus or pointed rod which Roman scribes used to make marks on wax tablets—suggests activity, taste is more passive.... Etymologically, the word we use derives from the Old French, meaning touch or feel, a sense that is preserved in the current Italian word for a keyboard, tastiera.”
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“The universal principle of etymology in all languages: words are carried over from bodies and from the properties of bodies to express the things of the mind and spirit. The order of ideas must follow the order of things.”
—Giambattista Vico (1688–1744)