Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc.games.flight-sim
Path: gmd.de!rrz.uni-koeln.de!unidui!math.fu-berlin.de!xlink.net!sol.ctr.columbia.edu!news.kei.com!ub!acsu.buffalo.edu!ubvms.cc.buffalo.edu!v110mhwh
From: v110m…@ubvms.cc.buffalo.edu (David M Stokes)
Subject: AOE is INCREDIBLE!!!
Message-ID:
News-Software: VAX/VMS VNEWS 1.41
Sender: n…@acsu.buffalo.edu
Nntp-Posting-Host: ubvmsb.cc.buffalo.edu
Organization: University at Buffalo
Date: Mon, 20 Sep 1993 21:20:00 GMT
Lines: 11

I’m really hoping that someday soon I’ll see that subject heading up
here… :( Yea I know how you feel. BASTARD! How could I?? Well
we got a few guys here at work chewing their legs off waiting… since
Feb if I can remember back that long… Oh well…

Word! Woot there it is!

Dave

I am not responsible for anything.

And yeah, there’s really not that much that’s been kept of early IRC or MUDs etc. I mean, 90% of it was drek, but still.

Still, it’s better than lead water pipes.

OK, that’s just funny.

WTF is with w00t ? Never heard it before. ;)

Personally, I prefer ftw!

I understand the demand for a written record as tangible evidence to settle a point of debate, but surely you must understand how much that privileges some kinds of communication over others? I’m speaking more from the point of view of a linguist than a lexicographer — but there are innumerable points in history, cultures, and subcultures that rely mostly on an oral tradition or something like it, and words that only exist orally as opposed to being written down. In Japan, for instance, it’s much less likely that anyone would even write down oral slang than it is here. Hacker subculture was quasi-criminal, another aspect that doesn’t lend itself well to records.

Anyway, I get the tendency to say “well, if it’s not written down it can’t be proved, so the official history is just what’s written,” but in the big picture, across time and cultures, that’s basically promoting falsehood via omission. Better to say that it’s unclear due to lack of evidence than stick to a theory that’s incomplete because it’s only based on the written. (And maybe you’re not sticking tenaciously to the “song” theory, in which case thumbs up.)

I’d guess that the only real way to investigate this further would be for someone to conduct ethnographic interviews before people who used these words in the early 90s die. Again, that’s because I don’t necessary privilege something that’s published over the oral reports of actual speakers. (I mean, journalists are almost as unreliable, when you get down to it.) I’d hazard two conjectures: a linguistic ethnographer would find people who do remember using and hearing people use this word in computer contexts before 1994, and due to the simultaneous popularity of two versions of an almost-identical song, a majority of interviewees will recall the song phrase as “Whoomp! There it is” instead of “Whoot.” My informal polling of a dozen people strongly suggests that, and Ferox just a few posts upthread is another example. I think the “Whoomp!” version was simply a lot more popular.

For instance, Googling for this phrase with variants that have a “t” sounds results in around 6000 hits total. Variants with a “p” result in about 71000 hits, with the majority being for “Whoomp” as suggested by Ferox and someone else in your thread. I mean, I guess it’s possible that the 10% “whoot” minority somehow were the ones that popularized the phrase online and kept the T as opposed to a P, which you would expect if it was a straightforward migration from a song to onlnie gaming. But I think it’s more likely that:

a) some form of this utterance was in use in simultaneous computer-mediated communication contexts before 1994, although not in widespread enough use for it to spread onto Usenet or media with a higher degree of fixity;

b) in 1994, a similar vocal utterance with a “p” on the end became very popular in totally different contexts

c) as online games continued to grow in the mid-to-late 90s with Ultima Online, Everquest, etc, it was easier for the CMC utterance (“a”) to gain a wider foothold because more gamers had been exposed to a similar-sounding utterance via “b”

Given that there’s some evidence for both “a” and “b” even if it’s not “written record” I think that’s a plausible hypothesis. Especially because I have actual memory of “a” in my brain circa 1992.

By the way, I’m a VP of the American Dialect Society and author of the “amusing” post about the woot/w00t history. I’d love to be able to prove that the word was older than 1993 in hacker/gamer/IRC uses, but so far all the people insist that it is have provided zero hard evidence. There are a few uses of similar words before then, but they’re used differently and have no context to show that they are the same word as used today. Like all historical lexicographers, I work with what can be proven, and I try to limit the surmise, conjecture, and intuition to very small sentences buffered with lots of hedge words like perhaps, probably, maybe, unlikely, likely, seems, etc. So, the call for evidence is out! Bring the hard, incontrovertable evidence and change lexicographical history.