Where Do “Shenanigans” Come From? (2013)
english.stackexchange.com
english.stackexchange.com
Hooligan definitely does come from Irish, from a troublesome family O'Houlihan
A few other interesting English words that come from Irish: Galore (from Go leoir, meaning a lot), bother, a slew of, phoney, bog and bogeyman, and unsurprisingly "whiskey".
Original gaelic Irish word 'sionnachuighm' meaning to play tricks - rough pronunciation at that time 'shinnuckeem'.
The Gold Rush, like many other economic frenzies, gives us many novel words for fraud:
> The "Philadelphia Times" (Nov. 5. 1877), in defining the word skullduggery [which Bartlett calls "a very good and very common word in the West"], says, "Its best Eastern equivalent is shenanigan, although the less complicated word hornswoggling [which Bartlett also identifies as "Western"] rather directly translates it."
"'Smithereens' is one of those unusual nouns that, like 'suds' and 'secateurs', never venture out by themselves - the word is always plural."Being obligatorily plural is a much less unusual trait. We have glasses, pants, and scissors too.
Perhaps in early days they literally were two pieces, two blades etc.
There was a lot of flexibility and inventiveness in the English language and modes of communication at the time (mid 1800s). Besides the flood of immigrants and the rise of literacy and mass media, this was the era of the telegraph and the Pony Express. The US Postal Service measured mail in the half ounce at the time (https://about.usps.com/who/profile/history/domestic-letter-r...), which led to a creative method of saving postage and writing paper called "cross writing" (https://easygenie.org/blogs/news/mysterious-letter-from-the-...)
About the Irish in CA, yes. In 1880 a full third of SF was Irish.
(credit to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VL9whwwTK6I)
The last Oxford Word of the Year was "goblin word", which does sound like it comes from young people, who likely don't have expert grasp on existing language. The full list[1] does contain words like "youthquake", "post-truth", "climate emergency", "squeezed middle" which are likely to have been coined by a much older crowd with more higher education. The second kind of phrases feel much less new, even though both these and "goblin mode" are made up of existing words.
Conclusion: claim seems correct but more research needed.
Now "post-truth", "climate emergency" and "squeezed middle" are hardly new words. The first one is just applying the highly productive prefix "post". Anyone with a decent command of English can do this. E.g. Rust programmers are envisioning a "post-C" tech landscape. "Climate emergency" is just an obvious word combination: there is an emergency and it has to do with climate. Someone in 1920 could have pointed to the new Coca-Cola bottle and remarked on its squeezed middle.
In the case of shenanigans, I don't suspect that the person who coined it didn't know of ways to express the idea.
Shenanigans is one of the words which expresses, "things are going on that don't sit well with me/someone for some reason", which is a variation on "I don't like it".
People are attracted to new words in this area, because it isn't interesting or original to make remarks about not liking something. A fresh word adds color to it.
I think they are optimizing for the culture (which includes new technologies and methodologies), which shows competent command. These new words are memes in the most useful sense and they do not limit themselves to other cultures' (even past versions of their own) vocabulary.
Some people may imagine this degenerates into a condensed "newspeak". The defacto human behavior is to generate utilitarian permutations, so this is unlikely to occur or be maintained organically.
https://www.shakespeare.org.uk/explore-shakespeare/shakesped...