Pylimitics

A sort of old-fashioned cheer — it sounds very British, probably because it is —goes like this: “Hip, hip, hooray!” It’s older than you might think. It was first recorded in an 1803 poem with the title (big surprise here) Hip, hip, hurrah. The poem illustrates one thing, at least – while today we generally yell “Three Cheers!” before the “hip hip” part, back then people were much more enthusiastic. The poem includes the lines:

“And NINE cheers for the girls that we love.
Hip, Hip, Hip, Hurrah!”

So where did the cheer come from in the first place? The ‘hip’ word – really just a sound – seems to be what people in those days used in the same way we use ‘hey’ or ‘yo’; it was just to get someone’s attention. It was recorded as early as 1752. There’s an old myth around the coincidence that ‘hip’ is close to ‘hep,’ which was apparently the same sound or word in German. In 1819 there was a wave of anti-Semitism in Germany and there were riots where the rioters’ rallying cry was ‘hep hep.’ The riots came to be called the hep hep riots. And the myth is that ‘hep’ was an acronym for ‘Hierosolyma est perdita‘ (Jerusalem is lost), supposedly something the crusaders yelled centuries earlier. There are two problems with that idea: the whole ‘acronym’ approach is very much a 20th century construction, and there’s never been any inkling that any crusaders yelled anything of the sort. “Hep’, like ‘hip’ and ‘hey,’ is just an easy thing to yell. 

But then there’s the ‘hurrah’ (‘hooray’ nowadays). That seems to be a lot older than ‘hip.’ ‘Hurrah’ was first recorded in 1686, and its predecessor ‘huzzah’ dates to 1573.This part of the cheer, like ‘hip’, seems to be nothing more than something that’s convenient to yell. 

So there we have it. Several centuries of history and scholarship about nonsense syllables that sound good when you yell them out loud!