hootenanny

English

Etymology

Unknown; potentially Scottish. Use is tied to the Appalachian culture in the US.

Pronunciation

  • (UK) IPA(key): /ˈhutənæni/

Noun

hootenanny (plural hootenannies)

  1. (music) An informal, festive performance by folk singers, often including audience participation with the use of acoustic instruments.
    Coordinate term: jam session
    • 2012 December 21, Monique Keiran, “Humans get more nutrition from tastier food”, in Times Colonist, 155th year, number 10, Victoria, B.C.: TC Publication Limited Partnership, →ISSN, →OCLC, page A13, column 4:
      The brain matches the mind-image of doughnuts to images and emotions stored in his brain’s memory regions: “Mmmm … doughnuts.” Then—bingo!—his brain’s dopamine-producing reward centres light up and have a rip-roaring hootenanny.
    • 2013 August 11, Jody Rosen, “Jody Rosen on the Rise of Bro-Country”, in New York Magazine‎[1]:
      It bespoke country’s devotion to realism, to songs about Saturday night’s hootenanny and Sunday morning’s moral reckoning, not to mention the kitchen-table truths of Monday through Friday.
  2. (obsolete) A placeholder word for a nonspecific or forgotten thing.
    Synonyms: thingamajig; see also Thesaurus:thingy

Further reading

This article is issued from Wiktionary. The text is available under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 unless otherwise noted. Additional terms may apply for the media files.