As any Tech graduate knows, the quickest wrong answer is, it is a castrated turkey. Even, or especially, a green country boy knew better than that. The sophisticated know it has no meaning and that its first appearance on campus was from a cheer over one hundred years ago.

The official line for some time has been that "Hokie is a coined word, derived from the 'Old Hokie' spirit yell, which was composed by O.M. Stull, in 1896 in a student body contest. According to Stull, the word had absolutely no meaning and was used merely as an attention-getter.

That cheer goes like this:

Hokie Bird

Sola is an interjection "calling for or trying to attract attention. Thus, "attention-getters" were available to Mr. Stull. Why would he need to coin one? Does the sound of Hoki sound like much of an attention-getter?

Another version is that the official school name was changed in 1896 to Virginia Polytechnic Institute (VPI) from the Virginia Agricultural and Mechanical College and new cheers were needed to accommodate this name change. This story is that the sound of Hokie was needed to rhyme with the new name VPI. The problem is it's the phrase Hokie Hi that rhymes with VPInot the word Hokie.

That should settle it. Who could question the author of the Hokie Cheer and years of tradition? With humility and much hesitation I do. Reason requires it.

For one thing, the word Hokey, spelled several ways but pronounced the same, existed many years prior to 1896. It appears in publications shortly after the Civil War mostly in Irish Catholic magazines. It was an interjection at that time. In Irish-American dialog phrases like "By the hokey", "Be the hokey", "By hokey", and "hokey! the deer's off like lightnin' " are common. This material would have been freely available to everyone on the Tech campus in 1895. The expression - By Hokey - is still common today among rural Virginians.

Also, the U.S. slang term "hokey" meaning sentimental, popular, sensational, or unreal situations, dialogue, etc., in a film or play etc.; bunkum (as in sounds a little hokey to me) originated in 19th century America.

Much older and possibly more significant is the word Hock (pronounced Hoke) from old England. The Dictionary of Phrase and Fable by E. Cobham Brewer, the New and Enlarged Edition of 1894 list 'Hoky' or 'Hockey Cake' as a harvest cake. The cake given out to the harvesters when the hock cart reached home. The Hock Cart or high cart was the last cart-load of harvest. ( "For joy to see the hock-cart crowned." from Hesperides by Robert Herrick, 1591-1674)

This is significant for two reasons. The fact that the phonetic sound Ho-ky has existed for some time, and that the word is tied to farming as we shall discuss later.

This Middle English word comes from the Saxon (Germanic). That, coupled with the fact that many of the Valley farmers were German and the rest were Scots-Irish or Border English, all of which held to the older Elizabethan English, makes for strong circumstantial evidence.

The German word "hoche" (pronounced 'hokie' ), meaning High, came into the Valley English both from Old Saxon English and directly from the German Valley immigrants. The "English" east of the Blue Ridge used "hokie" as a derisive term to mean "Valley farmer", with strong implications that he was not only a laboring farmer, but also of German descent. We know that the Saxon part of England settled Eastern Virginia. We know that the Valley was heavily German and that they spoke German into the Twentieth Century.

My educated guess is that hock or hoche to a 19th Century Virginian meant High as in the Most High God. Thus the "by Hokey". Even the atheist can't resist used the Lord's name. But in Virginia one had to use Lordy, Gosh or Goodness in their oaths. I can see hokey (High) being used in a 19th Century oath.

Given these facts, can the status quo go unquestioned? It just does not satisfy reason. Although the conventional theory seems weak, there has never been an alternative until a few years ago. Now a new story has surfaced and it sparked the investigation that lead to this article.

A UVA undergraduate student of 1958-59 was told that the UVA 'Wahoo' and the VA Tech 'Hokie' cross-named each other with these derogatory/pejorative names. The wahoo or yahoo was an imaginary race of brutish creatures resembling human beings in Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels. But in 1890 it meant a hooligan or lout, which was the reputation held by rural Virginians of rich, city boys at UVA. In turn, UVA rivals saw the new VPI as still a "farm school" for farm boys. If hokie was the pejorative for the Valley of Virginia farmer then it would have fit the UVA view of its college team. Although I can not make that connection or establish that meaning to the word Hokie, I can show that it was a common occurrence for teams of the times to be named by rowdy rivals and their fans.

Virginia Tech was an early Land-grant college and a mostly agricultural school with students from farms or small towns. Academic snobbery being what it has always been, the land grant/agricultural schools were not accepted by the older established institutions on par. VA Tech shared this fate with other great schools like Purdue and Texas A&M.

Although I raise more questions than I answer, I hope the questions are founded on a solid base. I have only heard this story from one source. I pray that this article will bring about more support for it if it is true.

The story is believable not simply because someone heard it. It is believable because first, it fits human nature, that most unchanging force. What is more human than name calling? It seems like the small child's first words.

Christians, cops and Mormons were not names the groups gave themselves, but a second generation accepted them as their own. The examples of this are almost countless.

With only a little effort I was able to find several examples of college teams being tagged with their rivals taunting names.

The University of Virginia has multiple nicknames, too. They explain it this way:

The Oxford Dictionary defines a wahoo as a yahoo which means a coarse bestial person; a lout, a hooligan. The Dictionary of Fables offers "Yahoo A savage; a very ill-mannered person". These are not the type of nicknames a school would give itself. All these terms are slang originating in the 19th century.

There are other examples of this in college sports.

Purdue is a land-grant college like VA Tech and was established as a college to teach agriculture and the "mechanic arts." Their rivals derided them in the age of steam power as mere 'boilermakers'. The name stuck, was soon accepted and is their official moniker today.

Texas A&M is another land-grant college. It was an agricultural school and its nickname is the Aggies. Not a name likely select first by the student body. "Aggies are sometimes also referred to as farmers." Would opposing teams have called VPI students anything but farmers?

The Fighting Irish are as unsure of their history as the Wahoos and Hokies. They explain their nickname this way:

There is nothing conclusive in what I have found. I desire only to open the doors of discussion to this theory. I have faith that someone has the answer to the riddle.

To paraphrase Winston Churchill, this is not the end of the beginning, but the beginning of the beginning. I hope to inspire discussion and more fruitful research.

Somewhere in an old Virginia newspaper or journal is an explanation of the origin of the word Hokie and its association with that fine school VA Tech. Someone will do the research and discover the answer to the riddle. We will all owe that person three cheers.

Copyright 1999. Edgar A. Howard, Narrows, VA 24124-1711