I Missed The Hoodie Memo

"Hoodie" is a word whose arrival I somehow missed. I know when I first heard the word. It was nearly 8 years ago. So it's been around for a long time, yet for some reason the spell check for Blogspot doesn't recognize it as a real word. So I'm not the only one to miss its arrival. I wonder where the word came from, and how such a unique word found its way into everyday vernacular.

Let me step back about 8 years to the time I first heard the word. It was 2002, a couple months before I retired, and right after SOUTH PACIFIC closed. On the Monday or Tuesday following the musical, a sweet, soft-spoken freshman named Maria, her surname is lost somewhere in the last 8 years, came into my classroom during 10th period and said, "Mr. Ellstrom, I left my light blue hoodie in the orchestra room on Saturday, and it's gone now." I had no idea what she was talking about, but she said "hoodie" with such matter-of-factness that I was apparently embarrassed to ask just what a hoodie was. Instead, I took her down to the costume room where all the left behind stuff was piled up and helped her look. And I found it, too. I saw in the pile a light blue hooded sweatshirt, picked it up and said, "Is this it?" "Yes," she smiled. So she had her hoodie back, and I knew what one was. As I walked back to my room, I thought about this interesting, new, sort of cutesy kind of word I had learned. "Hoodie!" What a perfect name for 14 or 15 year old girls to be calling their little light blue sweatshirts. "That is the cutest hoodie ever!" they would say while shopping in American Eagle or Aeropostale.

Of course, as often seems to happen, after you hear a word for the first time, you start to hear it constantly. That's what happened with "hoodie." Now, almost everyone I know uses the word. And that's weird because it sounds like a word that should describe the clothing of some little kid, not the wardrobe choice of a 50 year old, beer-bellied plumber, who wears his jeans disastrously low.

Why do I bring this up now? This morning I was watching the local news, when the description of a burglary or murder or something awful suspect came up. The news anchor described the fellow as big, tattooed, and dangerous, wearing blue jeans, a black wool cap, and a dark blue "hoodie!" That word just knocked the scare factor out of that description.

I think this weekend I'll do a little Google searching for the origin of the word "hoodie." If I find out just where it came from, I'll let you know.