The incredible two-headed heffalump
It’s not unusual for an English word to have quite a few unrelated meanings, or even turn out to be more than one word with the same sound. As you might think, this happens more often with words that have been around for centuries. It’s also more common with simpler one- or two-syllable words, and with words that are in common usage. But once in a while you come across a word that seems to ignore all those customs. In fact it’s possible that we’ve got English all wrong, and it’s not a complicated mass of contradictions for all the reasons we’ve suspected. It’s just that in its rush to include words from practically everywhere, some impish, badly-behaved words have snuck in.
If you imagine a mass rally attended by English words both well-mannered and not, it seems like the event would be quite the ballyhoo, the ruckus, the uproar. “Ballyhoo” is a word that would definitely be on the impish side, probably right in the middle of the mosh pit. It seems to have appeared around 1900, which isn’t very long ago at all in etymological time. It originally meant the speech of barker at a circus sideshow as he tried to exhort the crowd to pay a nickel and enter the tent to see “the incredible two-woozled heffalump,” or whatever he happened to have in there.
“Ballyhoo” seems to have originated in the slang used by carnival workers, but by the 1920s had come into occasional use in the wider population. Its meaning also shifted from a single person talking as loudly as possible to a general uproar or fuss. That’s pretty quick work for a word that at that point was only about twenty years old. “Ballyhoo” was already ignoring the norms of customary word behavior.
But wait, there are some other oddities about “ballyhoo.” In addition to originating as the marketing pitch for folks to pay to see, for example, a bird with four wings and two heads, it turns out that “ballyhoo” also means a mythical bird that had… four wings and two heads. (There’s no evidence that the two meanings are related; I manufactured that apparent coincidence myself.)
Nobody is quite sure where “ballyhoo” came from, but there may be a clue in a line published in 1927: “What the ballyhooley do you call this?” It seems there was what sounded like a form of “ballyhoo” that you might not have expected. But it also turns out that “Ballyhooley” is a town in Ireland — more specifically in County Cork. And Ballyhooley was famous in the 1700s for being a boisterous town where street fights were common. It was not a particularly pleasant place, evidently, and its name became a synonym for “hell” — hence the phrase “what the Ballyhooley...” So that might at least partially explain some of the connotations of “ballyhoo”.
Except rowdiness is not the only thing “ballyhoo” has meant. It’s also a kind of sailing ship. A “ballyhoo” was a ship that just wasn’t very good. And although a “ballyhoo”, when it meant a bird, was quite mythical, there was (and probably still is) a completely real kind of fish called a ballyhoo.
There are separate origin possibilities for a couple of those meanings — the “ballyhoo” that’s a ship might have come from the Spanish word “balahou” (small schooner). The “ballyhoo” that’s a fish could be based on “balao,” which is the original name of that fish. But in general the story behind “ballyhoo” remains pretty murky. There might be a simple, clear explanation, of course — we just can’t hear it amidst all the ballyhoo.
