Oh yeah. There’s my favorite discussion of this term on this board here.
I’ve been mostly aware of “pitching woo” as a euphemism for sex. I first heard the expression eons ago in the Jerry Lewis movie “Visit to a Small Planet” – a light-hearted farce based on Gore Vidal’s Goodyear_Television_Playhouse dark science fiction drama by the same name.
It brings to mind “making whoopee” (second definition) as well.
- Jack
Ah yes, I remember that thread well. There’s some fine insanity in there.
If you search for “woo woo” as a phrase and apply minimal smoothing, you can see this chart, which shows a steady, pronounced increase from 1965 to 1970, a second surge in use in 1991 (even clearer with no smoothing applied), and then another dramatic increase in 2004.
I suspect the late 60s bump was due to the rise in the “new age” movement, and the application of the term “woo-woo” to such, but I don’t have any evidence for this hypothesis. Interestingly, looking at words like “new age” and “horoscope” don’t show any significant trend around 1970, which we tend to think of as the start of the popularization of such things.
I suspect the surge in 1991 could be traced to James Randi using it, but again, I don’t have anything to support this contention.
Increasing use of the term “woo” can be at least partially explained by there being so much more of it these days.
Or so it seems.
This has been my experience too; I’ve never heard the term anywhere except the SDMB and even then it’s only been in the past couple of weeks. Never heard the term on TV, the radio, or read it in a newspaper- I’m not doubting that it’s a real word, I’m just working out why it really does appear to have become popular here recently for no particular reason.
Did you read your own cites?
Shakespeare uses “from whence” numerous times. Good enough for the Bard, good enough for anyone else.
A quick Google search for “woo-woo” while limiting the results to the SDMB returns plenty of results from throughout the years where the term was used in this context. Clicking through just the first few pages of results I find clear examples from 2003 and 2004 and I’m sure even further back with a more detailed search. We also seem to enjoy using this term to describe the sound of a train whistle, the legendary chant of Curly Howard, an expression of celebration, e.g. “woo woo hoo!!” but it’s still easy to pick out examples where it was used to describe magical thinking and bad science from at least 7-8 years ago.
I’ve always thought of “woo-woo” as a vocalization of the Twilight Zone theme.
Pretty appropriate, if you ask me.
No such thing. The early occurrence of “woo-woo,” when it’s not an artifact of Google’s poor character recognition, is almost entirely onomatopoeic or salacious; I looked at every single document up through 1970, and sampled dozens up to 1989 – trains sounds, wolf sounds, singing, nicknames, and more, but not a single mention of the type in the OP. I could have missed something in the 20-year span I sampled, but since Google only indexes books and magazines, it’s not worth the effort; the first public appearance of this usage is likely to appear in an interview of some sort. Maybe a newspaper search of some sort would be revealing.
I narrowed your Google search to 1991 and found a handful of uses of “woo-woo” as a description for something spiritual or pseudoscientific, broadly including references to Jack Kerouac, God, Gaia, “medicine” in the native american or faith healing sense, Earth First!, literary criticism of mythology, and my favorite, “Journey into the “woo-woo”: A theoretical exploration of the use of metaphor in psychotherapy.” Oh, and one writer used it as an epithet for unrealistic business expectations. I don’t doubt that Randi was using it by then, but there’s no evidence here.
Wow, cool! I thought about going back and looking at the actual citations, but I didn’t have time when I posted. Interesting that we can pinpoint 1991 then as the first popular use of woo-woo to mean (basically) bullshit. That ngram viewer is an amazing tool!
Yes, it’s from wind noise in old empty houses, intended to indicate people who believe in ghosts and everything similar.
I vaguely recall encountering “wooOOOOO” as a kid in the late 60s. If you want to ridicule/dismiss something as crazy, and to show that you’re definitely not part of that trash, you describe the crazy ideas while rotating your finger around one side of your head, and perhaps roll your eyes. But if you’re on the phone where the “craziness rotary finger sign” doesn’t work, instead you say “wooOOOoo.” I’ve always assumed that it came from something like this:
So, you actually BELIEVE …in GHOSTS?! WooooOOOOOooo! (said while prancing around making scary claws from hands.) 
It certainly fulfilled a needed function. If you’re skeptical of some crazy claims (not exclusively ghosts,) but if you need to describe them in detail, listeners might assume that you’re a believer! To put a stop that that, just describe them with a sneer while throwing in some "oh yeah riiiight"s. Even better is to describe them while sneering, AND rotating your finger around the side of your head, AND ending each sentence with “WoooOOOOooo!” That way nobody can mistake you for a supporter.
And so …how do you run a search on a word with a variable number of "ooo"s?
Lance Turbo’s post has a use from 1986 (though his link won’t load for me). And in the quoted text the woman drops the term without explanation, suggesting it was at least in somewhat common use at that point.
I don’t know about origin, but the phrase always makes me think of Daffy Duck going into an insanity fit.
It may have been used earlier, but on old USENET groups I used to frequent in the late 90’s it took off after the skeptics got fed up with the overwhelming number of names the paranormal believers used in their arguments: septics, skepticultists, skeptinazis, etc. We got a little tired of having no descriptive term to bash them in reply, so when woowoo came around it took off like a shot.
Looking through the Google results, the term seems to appear in the late 80s.
Joe E. Barnhart, Stephen Winzenburg **1988 **“Jim and Tammy: charismatic intrigue inside PTL”
Terry Cole-Whittaker 1987 “*Inner Path from Where You Are to Where You Want to Be: A Spiritual Odyssey” *
Hillel Schwartz **1990 **"Century’s end: a cultural history of the fin-de-siècle–from the 990s to the 1990s"
Laura Coltelli 1990 “Winged words: American Indian writers speak”
*The ecologist: Volumes 20-21 * 1990
Marjorie Gersh **1990 ** “California and Hawaii publishing market place: a comprehensive directory of markets, resources, and opportunities for writers” In a list of things not to submit for publication
Rik Scarce 1990 “Eco-warriors: understanding the radical environmental movement”
From an etymological point of view, these references indicate that the term became popularised in certain groups in the late 70s/ early 80s sometime. By the late 80s the term was still unusual enough that it required quotes when used alone.
The fact that “woo woo land” is used multiple times in the late 80s and doesn’t receive quotes suggests that either this is the real origin of the expression, or else it is self-evident enough not to require them.
I did find one *possible *reference from 1976
“Spiritus mundi: essays on literature, myth, and society” Northrop Frye. Referring to the work of German author Oswald Spengler:
The relevance of this is debatable IMO. The reference is to woo-woo noises. not to woo woo beliefs, and as Nametag points out, there are endless examples of onomatopoeic usage of “woo” prior to the late 80s. However it is interesting for two reasons.
Firstly it is the earliest use of the term in reference to pseudoscientific writings.
Secondly it supports the “ghost/scary noises” origin of the term. It is clear from context that it is meant to refer to scary noises, and that he knew that his audience would understand that without it being explained.
So while I’m undecided that this is the earliest example of woo-woo being used to mean garbage, it is an interesting date point.
Me too. In fact that’s where I always assumed it originated.
And of course it was used by the Three Stooges as well, in a similar context.
So there seem to be two equally plausible explanations: the “spooky ghost noise” explanation and the Daffy Duck style madness “woo woo” sound.
The Frye reference given above suggests the ghost story origin. The “Woo Woo Land” usages popular in the 80s suggests the Daffy Duck origin.
I never heard the term “woo” used outside of an archaic romantic context until I came here. But I picked up its meaning easily.
I know the term woo-woo from a collection of essays entitled Making Book, by Teresa Nielsen Hayden. In the last article “The Pastafazool Cycle” she uses it in the first sentence and the last sentence, and throughout. In an introductory note the book has to the article, Nielsen Hayden writes, “May 1991… ‘Woo-woo,’ a technical term in publishing signifying anything from ‘new age’ to ‘occult’ to ‘pure wishful thinking,’ was much deployed.”
The context of the original writing of the article was an online discussion forum on GEnie. So that might be one possible indication that the spike in 1991 is really indicative that the term was in regular use in publishing and scholarship circles at that time.