Hoopie

Hoopie is a slang term with multiple possible means.

Slang term for West Virginians
"Hoopie" is a derogatory term for people from the northern panhandle of West Virginia. The term is in common use in the Upper Ohio River Valley--northern West Virginia, eastern Ohio and southwestern Pennsylvania.

This bit of regional slang came into use in the area in and around East Liverpool, Ohio. In the 19th-century, East Liverpool was the site of a substantial amount of pottery manufacture. In the days before cardboard boxes and Bubble Wrap, pottery was packed in wooden barrels, with bundles of straw used as cushioning to reduce the chance of breakage during shipment.

These barrels were built at local pottery cooper shops. The coopers used split saplings to serve as the hoops holding the barrel staves in place. They did this by winding the sapling around the barrel and then weaving together the ends, or using a small nail to hold the ends together. Iron hoops were expensive and therefore not widely used.

People living in the back hills near East Liverpool would come to town carrying bundles of the split saplings, which they would sell to the cooper shops. They would then use the cash to buy things they could not make at home, such as salt and gunpowder.

Because the sellers were often poor, ragged and illiterate hill folk, the townspeople looked down on them and derogatorily referred to them as "hoopies" because they brought the hoops into town. The term became entrenched in the area and remains in use to this day, along with its corollaries, "hillbilly" and "hilljack."

Slang term for a type of truck
Hoopie is the name given to a straight truck used in the trucking industry. Hoopies sometimes have a lift gate and/or refrigeration units attached to the "box" of the truck. Hoopies are used frequently for residential deliveries, or for deliveries in which the streets are very narrow or lack parking.

In rural northwestern Pennsylvania, a "hoopie" is a vehicle made from a car or truck chassis, and homemade seats. Not street-legal, it is driven only on trails in the woods.

In Michigan, African-Americans sometimes refer to a junky car as a "hooptie".

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