I ran across a website that had a list of the most commonly used literary references, that most people don’t even know where they originated…this one caught my attention, I thought it was rather interesting the way that we have developed phrases and words into our every day lives so that it is expected that everyone knows the terms as part of the American culture.

Yahoo. We know it either as a way to describe an idiot or as the Betamax of search engines. But… yahoo is really a term that was coined by Jonathan Swift in “Gulliver’s Travels”.

In the book, Gulliver ends up in a country ruled by horses… where they boss around deformed, brutish, primitive humans, called Yahoos.

That’s how the term yahoo entered the cultural lexicon as a way to describe low-brow humans. And, apparently, the guys who founded Yahoo.com picked that name because they felt the word yahoo described the unsophisticated, undeveloped Internet at that time. (http://www.11points.com/Books/11_Literary_References_People_Make_Without_Realizing_It)

This is just one of their many examples on the website, and I think it’s a really good one.  This is an example that we have come to just accept certain terms, I don’t know a single person that has ever wondered where the term yahoo came from, I think most people, myself included just took it as the expression of excitement that someone decided to name their search engine, it never even crossed my mind that it could have come from some other place and had a real meaning behind it, as suggested on the website.

Like literature I have seen many people, especially in the younger generations reference and quote movies, and than not even know that’s what they were doing, they may have never even seen the movie, just heard someone else quote it once before.  It’s interesting how terms and phrases get adopted into our culture and then are never let go, just passed on and passed on, generally taking on a slightly different meaning all together until it no longer has the same meaning that it was originally intended.