Yee-haw

Yee- haw [/ ji ː hɔ / ] is a common in English, especially American English interjection. It expresses joy or exuberance of, comparable to the German " yay, " and is particularly as stereotyped exclamation of cowboys about the rodeo known.

Etymology and usage

The etymology of yee - haw is uncertain; William Safire suggested that the word of the attested for centuries shouts gee and haw derived, which - according to German hott and rg - teams of horses were ordered to the left or right. From the American "Wild West " and the cultural representation of the same instance in Wild West novels and films are numerous interjections with the initial sound / j / documented, for example yippy - aye -ay, yowee, yea and yo; , " shout, yell, " a connection with the verb yell is conceivable. In the collective consciousness until very recently, were mainly the exclamation yippie! and yahoo! anchored as a cowboy calls. The use of the two words in this sense, but markedly decreased, which Safire leads back to displacement by newly emerged meanings: Yippie was umgemünzt ( in analogy to hippie ) to a notion of a counterculture of the 1960s, Yahoo can now not only as before at Gullivers Travel to think, but also to the same Internet search engine. So yee haw - sat! Whose Erstbeleg in the Oxford English Dictionary ( OED ) only dates back to the year 1977, when unloaded by alternative. The OED leads the word under the lemma yeehaw, but Safire recommends a spelling with a hyphen.

In Internet forums, but also in printing units often find different information about the origin of the exclamation. The presumption that interjection imitating onomatopoeic cries of the donkey, is probably based on a confusion because the vocalizations of the donkey are reproduced in English hee - haw usually with. Even the rebel yell, the famous battle cry of the Confederates in the Civil War is sometimes rendered with yee - haw, but he probably had a much more complex sound structure. Finally, there is sometimes an indication that word so can be derived from the language of the Seminoles, the Native Americans of Florida. In fact, the still existing settlement Yeehaw Junction was founded in 1896 in Florida, whose place name yaya on seminolisch, "Wolf" back. Nevertheless, there is no etymological connection, the homography is probably not caused by corruption than by chance, particularly as the use and spelling of the interjection established only in the late 20th century.