Illustration by Britt Spencer
Ask this question anywhere besides here, and you’ll be told that a hoosier is simply someone from Indiana. Here in St. Louis, however, the word has a different, more derogatory meaning. For some locals, “hoosier” is the epithet of choice for condemning anyone perceived as less cultured, intelligent, and urbane than oneself. It’s like the classist slur version of toasted ravioli.
Origin stories abound for the word, though most are pure hogwash. One prominent folk legend holds that in olden times, when coming upon a country cabin, it was customary to inquire, “Who’s here?” Similarly, it’s said that the morning after a particularly vicious brawl between early settlers, a barkeep discovered bitten-off body parts littering his floor and asked, “Whose ear?” A more plausible theory posits that “hoosier” was derived from the Saxon word “hoo,” meaning hill, making hoosiers and hillbillies linguistic cousins.
Wherever it came from, “hoosier” was in common use in the South by the 19th century as “a term of contempt and opprobrium…used to denote a rustic, a bumpkin, a countryman, a roughneck, a hick or an awkward, uncouth or unskilled fellow,” notes Jeffrey Graf of Indiana University’s Herman B Wells Library. Through the quirks of dialect, the word disappeared from most of the country, took a more positive tone in Indiana, and retained its original meaning in just one place: St. Louis.
For his book Hoosiers and Scrubby Dutch: St. Louis’s South Side, local author Jim Merkel asked people on the street to define a hoosier. Poor lawn care, bad haircuts, and a love of guns were cited as common characteristics. The phrase “white trash” was used. “Basically, just people that like to barbecue every day, get fat, and do nothing,” said one man. Former Post-Dispatch columnist Elaine Viets once said that a hoosier “is a low-life redneck, somebody you can recognize because they have a car on concrete blocks in their front yard and are likely to have just shot their wife who may also be their sister.” The late author Richard Ben Cramer took a more nuanced approach in describing the city’s Board of Aldermen in the 1970s, which was dominated by old hoosiers: “South to a certain line, those people had been in the city for years—they were the Hoosierocracy; a bit further out lived the Hoosieoisie; and way out, with the pickups and three wheelers, were the Hoosietariat.”
But despite the “uncouth rustic” connotations, Merkel proudly describes himself as a South City hoosier and even wears a T-shirt bearing the label. They might not be slick, but Merkel says good St. Louis hoosiers are caring people who invite neighbors to come by and sit a spell. Probably on their camouflage couches.
