WTN: hobbledehoy
James Harbeck
hobbledehoy
What does a ragamuffin become when he hits that awkward age? A hobbledehoy.
Strictly speaking, hobbledehoy just means any awkward youth, in those gawky years between childhood and adulthood – though it typically implies is a boy. A girl, if she was not sufficiently “ladylike,” might in times past have been called a hoyden or a tomboy (hobbledehoy, hoyden, and tomboy? oy, oy, oy). I would like to suggest that an awkward but boisterous adolescent girl might be called a hobbledehoyden… but the words are not related, as far as we know.
Mind you, we are hobbled by incomplete etymological information. There are various guesses as to the origins of both words, but, as the words were confected not in the hallowed halls of academe or at the cramped carrels of the law-clerks but in the wide wild world, where writers simply put down what they heard and later readers tried to fit it with what they recognized, what we get is an awkward trail that has little more direction, reason, or consistency than a foolish fourteen-year-old.
In particular, we may note that most of the older appearances of hobbledehoy – in the 1500s and 1600s – are more like hobber-de-hoy or hobby de hoy or even hobbadehoy. They all have the hoy and they all have the hob and they even all have the de, but that first off-beat syllable is variable. It’s unlikely that the word has any original relation to hobble, but it’s clear to see that hobble drew the word to it. After all, hobbling is awkward, and hobbledehoys are awkward, and it just made sense, right?
Not that the word always implied that the person was awkward. It may have come from an old French word for a country squire (perhaps also applied to apprentices) plus another old French word for ‘today’, but that’s based on sound resemblance and has no real trail of evidence. Some suggest that it originally meant ‘today’s young upstart’, but all the recorded uses seem simply to signify a teenage boy, with all that is normally expected from one. The hobble just happened to be around, and the word’s development of form and sense has been hobbled by it.
What if it had been drawn into the gravity of some other word? One could imagine a historical circumstance in which the word instead shifted to hoppity-hoy, which would have been more lively. Well, when words are in that awkward period, you don’t always know just what they’re going to end up as. Just like awkward youths. For all you know, your hobbledehoy might end up happily matched to a flibbertigibbet.
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