In praise of 'Hooliganism'

[_MeDotOrg]

And now for something completely off topic:

Today there was an article on Slate about a social activist in Azerbaijan who was arrested for making a 'Harlem Shake' video. The charge? Hooliganism.

Hooligansim ? This is one of those words that just delights me. Like bounder or scoundrel or cad, it doesn't seem capable of encapsulating modern behavior. it's a word much of the old Communist world seemed to adopt instead of 'juvenile delinquent', but in a larger sense used to suppress all youthful dissent. The group Pussy Riot was arrested on charges of 'hooliganism' in Russia.

In the West, the word seemed to be use primarily to describer unruly soccer fans: Football hooligans.

The slightly murky etymology suggests that the word came into use sometime in the 1890's in London. It is either a bastardization of the Irish name Houlihan, or came from the actual London gangs the Hooligans or the O'Hooligans. The spread of language is fascinating to me: How can a word that was used to describe Irish gangs in the 1890's come to represent the act of recording a video in Azerbaijan in the 21st Century?