Hoosier

In 1900, Meredith Nicholson wrote The Hoosiers, an early attempt to study the etymology of the word as applied to Indiana residents.

Jacob Piatt Dunn, longtime secretary of the Indiana Historical Society, published The Word Hoosier, a similar attempt, in 1907.

[5] Both chronicled some of the popular and satirical etymologies circulating at the time and focused much of their attention on the use of the word in the Upland South to refer to woodsmen, yokels, and rough people.

[6] Johnathan Clark Smith subsequently showed that Nicholson and Dunn's earliest sources within Indiana were mistaken.

Smith's earliest sources led him to argue that the word originated as a term along the Ohio River for flatboatmen from Indiana and did not acquire its pejorative meanings until 1836, after Finley's poem.

Piersen proposed that Methodist communities inspired by his example took or were given a variant spelling of his name (possibly influenced by the "yokel" slang[8]) during the decades after his ministry.

[10][full citation needed][11] Jorge Santander Serrano, a PhD student from Indiana University, has also suggested that Hoosier might come from the French words for 'redness', rougeur, or 'red-faced', rougeaud.

as a general greeting and warning when hearing someone in the bushes and tall grass, to avoid shooting a relative or friend in error.

[13] The poet James Whitcomb Riley facetiously suggested that the fierce brawling that took place in Indiana involved enough biting that the expression "Whose ear?"

The account related by Dunn[15] is that a Louisville contractor named Samuel Hoosier preferred to hire workers from communities on the Indiana side of the Ohio River like New Albany rather than Kentuckians.

Dunn could not find any family of the given name in any directory in the region or anyone else in southern Tennessee who had heard the story and accounted himself dubious.

Evan Bayh and Sen. Vance Hartke, who introduced the story into the Congressional Record in 1975,[16] and matches the timing and location of Smith's subsequent research.

In the book Shanties from the Seven Seas[20] by Stan Hugill, in reference to its former use to denote cotton-stowers, who would move bales of cotton to and from the holds of ships and force them in tightly by means of jackscrews.