So, what is this Hoodsie that the author speaks of?
No, it's not the little ice cream cup with the wooden spoon in the picture above, although those are good and I want one right now.
Basically, a Hoodsie is a female teenager from the South Shore. It's more complicated than that, but that's the short answer.
Usually, the author finds out the answer to the question and then writes the article. That's not going to be the case here, as I am expecting the real answer to this question to turn up in the comments.
Here is what I don't know about the term, which makes for a longer article than if I told you what I know for sure:
- Why are South Shore girls known as Hoodsies?
- How far does the term range?
- When did the term come into use?
WHY?
I have no idea on the Why? The Hood company was founded in Charlestown, though they may have got the actual milk from Bridgewater. From what I have heard, the term is used by city people when speaking of South Shore girls. It seems pretty complicated for a nickname.
Boston University has The Wicked Good Guide To Boston English, and the term makes an appearance in there. It is not ascribed to the South Shore in there, nor was it listed so in the Universal Hub definition.
A thread on Yelp said that a Hoodsie was a sexually promiscuous girl below the legal age of consent, but they may be confusing that with "jailbait." The author may also have heard the term in his youth, when he was hunting South Shore snuggling from younger girls.
I have also heard, on Facebook, that the nickname stems from girls sitting on the hoods of cars.
As near as I can tell, Boston guys would go to the South Shore to get girls. Both dictionaries list "scoop" as a term for picking up girls. Hood was the dominant local ice cream, a Hoodsie is an individual serving, and here come Donna from Weymouth! The girls, equated with something you scoop like ice cream, thus became Hoodsies. I suppose that the fact that there aren't many reasons for a Boston guy to go to Abington beyond "scooping" also led to the association.
More than one source said that the Hoodsie's slogan of "small and sweet and good to eat" played a role in the name, but only one source notes the Hoodsie cup size connotation with the smaller breasts of the teenager.... which has to be true, because I read it on a site called Swing Batta Batta Swing.
I could be 1000% wrong about this, I'm speculating about something that barely merits a mention on the Internet.
EPICENTER, TIMING AND RANGE
If I'm not wrong about the South Shore ownership of the term, I'd assume that it came to us with the development of the highway system. I'd especially associate it with Route 3.
I say this because Route 3 either A) made it feasible to drive from Dorchester to Hanover to get a little somethin'-somethin', or B) led to an exodus from the city, which brought a term generally associated with Boston girls into the South Shore suburbs. SBBS listed the term as a Dorchester/Southie term, and the South Shore filled up with people from Southie, The Dot, JP, Roslindale and Hyde Park right around when busing started.
I actually like Option B the best, with Hoodsie as a White Flight import from the city. It makes the most sense, and it follows the path of least resistance. Boston schools went from 100,000 kids pre-busing to 55,000 kids in 1988, and many of the refugees ended up in the Irish Riviera.
Duxbury, for example, went from 4700 people in 1960 to 11,000 in 1980. That's a remarkable growth rate, even before you factor in the town's more elderly demographic. I, personally, was in Dorchester in 1970 and in Duxbury by 1978. I was not the only Dorchester kid in my Duxbury classes by a long shot. Plymouth went from 18,000 people in 1970 to 35,000 in 1980. Ol' Marsh Vegas went from 6000 in 1960 to 20,000 in 1980.
A lot and maybe most of that spike is the Baby Boom, but a lot of it is White Flight. It is, in my completely uneducated opinion, enough oomph to transfer slang from city to suburbs.
So, the date would either be the late 1950s (Route 3 goes through the South Shore) or the 1970s (White Flight). I'm hoping that some old-schooler enlightens me in the comments section. It may be a bit of both.
The range of the Hoodsie term becomes the issue here. I have only heard it ascribed to South Shore girls, but I also can only claim Duxbury, Halifax and Buzzards Bay as my last three hometowns. There could be Hoodsies running around in Natick or Woburn or Concord or Mansfield for all that I know.
If my White Flight theory is correct, the term would move out to the suburbs with the city kids. Enough white kids remained in the city for the term to remain there, but enough white kids had left that the term became suburban. It's sort of how the country with the most black people isn't African, it's Brazil... but, just about the opposite of that. I digress...
To determine the range of the Hoodsie by operating along this theory, you just have to go through some census numbers on Ye Olde Wikipedia. I already fed you Duxbury and Marsh Vegas data... how does the North Shore and Metro West stack up? Does the White Flight reach New Hampshire or even the South Coast?
I'll pick random towns, or we'll be here all day. We'll go 1970 population to 1980 population.
Stoneham... 17K to 21K, nine miles north of the Bean
Framingham... 64K to 65K
Middleboro... 13K to 16K
Foxboro... 14,218 to 14,178, and that's with the Patriots moving to town during the era in question.
Andover... 24 to 26K
Marion... 3400 to 3900
Manchester-by-the-Sea, 5100 to 5400
OK, what I'm seeing here and not listing in numbers is that Massachusetts suburban towns tended to have population explosions from 1950 to 1970, but the South Shore also had a Busing Boom in the 1970s that doubled the population of some towns.
To this day, people who know this stuff tell me that Geography isn't why the Cape Cod accent doesn't get across the Canal, it's that the Boston accent stormed South in the 1970s with all the White Flight kids. I can recall getting SPED-type help for my speech in 1978, my first year in Duxbury. All that I can remember of it was the lady making me say "barter" and "martyr" over and over.
SUMMARY
So, my research leads me to believe that "Hoodsie" is a Boston term, most likely distinct to the Irish parts of town like Jamaica Plain and Southie. When busing came, those cities disgorged their wealthier Irish-Catholics onto the South Shore, and those people brought the concept of the Hoodsie with them. By 1980, it had become a South Shore term, and by 2015, it had been South Shore long enough that city folk- the original Hoodsies- now referred to the South Shore girls as Hoodsies.
Yup, it's that confusing AFTER we try to summarize it. But I'm pretty sure that the theory is correct.
I thank you for your time.
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| Not hoodsies, just cool enough to pose for Cranberry County Magazine... |
