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The Many Faces of Woot

Yeah. Yay. Hoorah. Boorah. OMG. OMFG. Yippee. Youser. There are many ways to express pure, utter delight, awesomeness, triumph, glory, excitement, etc. You name it. If it is something to be happy about, there is sure to be a short word or acronym that is understood by the masses to convey that this thing about which you are so happy is a BFD. But the one word--or words--that I just can't get my head around is woot. I mean, is it supposed to be woot, or whoot? Woo-hoo or Woot-hoot? Woot-woot or....you get the drift. How is this supposed to be spelled and where did these many variations come from?

Searching deep within my soul, I did the only thing I could, which was to go to urbandictionary.com and investigate the matter. Because, I'm here to tell you, I have been totally SMOed over this for some time. I mean really. Seriously. For real. But sadly, what I learned, as is usually the case with urbandictionary and all things in cyberspace, there is no one right answer.


What I found, surprisingly, is that many of the variations of all things woot have origins in gaming, as in "We Owned the Other Team." Or, a combo of "Wow, Loot!" in Dungeons and Dragons. Although the site linked above suggests that Julia Roberts did a "Woot! Woot! Woot!" in Pretty Woman (Polo Scene), I would argue that since this movie was popular in the era of Arsenio Hall, she was actually yelling "Whoop! Whoop!" But since neither I nor the squidoo poster will probably (proly) ever get access to the original screen play, we will have to lay this one on the table. And, oh dear, I have severely digressed.

Now, back to the topic at hand--all things woot. I suppose it is perfectly fine to write whoot whoot, especially if you are Australian and would like to say "what?" Personally, I think the person who posted that definition of whoot is confusing Australians with Canadians, but meh, what aboot it? Anyway, suffice it to say, one would be correct in simply spelling it woot woot, especially if one is a hacker or gamer and knows that the "o" should really be "0". If you want to express even greater excitement, you might be inclined to say "Woot Hoot!" If you would like to show your age, you might want to stick with Woohoo. I would, however, caution one in using the term hoot hoot, which could be as benign as a Pokemon character or mean something entirely, altogether different, unless, of course you are an owl and have no other words in your dictionary. I guess there is nothing more to say on this but "Whatever! Get your woot, whoot, woo, hoo, woohoo, on and have a hoot, cuz I don't give a hoot!"

(Photo credit: photograph of the book cover "The Book of Awesome" by Neil Pasricha)

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