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David Spates There seems to be a lot
We've turned into a bunch of wooooo'ers. At some point within my lifetime we've gone
from yea'ers and clappers to wooooo'ers, and I don't recall being
asked whether I approved of the change. Was there a national
referendum I slept through? I'm talking about the way we as Americans
cheer and show our approval. We used to clap and yell out yea!
or some other derivative that started with the letter Y -- yahoo,
yippee, yaaaa and the like. And as we bellowed our favorite Y
cheer, we would clap -- sometimes in unison, sometimes to the
beat of our own drummer. Every so often you'd find someone who
could do that really cool trick of whistling extremely loudly
by inserting fingers in the mouth. A whistle like that can make
every dog in a three-block area cock its head. Even rarer is
the person who can produce that high-pitch, 200-plus decibel
whistle without putting his grimy fingers in his orifice. Somehow
he'd create that window-rattling whistle by tucking his upper
lip and ramming air through the space in his teeth that the orthodontist
couldn't quite fix. So there was the crowd of yesteryear - yowling,
clapping and whistling. Fast forward to today's crowd. While you still
hear plenty of clapping and maybe a little less whistling, the
cries that started with Y have been replaced by one sustained
wooooo. How did this happen? Am I the only one who has noticed
this? Obviously, this is not an observation you
note on a Saturday night while you and the wife are at home enjoying
a quiet, yet mentally invigorating, game of Chutes and Ladders.
You have to be in a crowd or watching a crowd on television.
Only there do the wooooo'ers of the world make themselves known. Here's how I can prove that the yea'ers are
out and the wooooo'ers are firmly entrenched. I was watching
a World War II documentary on the History Channel or the Discovery
Channel or A&E or whatever niche channel it may have been.
When the boys finally came home, they were greeted by cheering
- with yeas. You'd be hard-pressed to find anyone woooooing in
1945. It simply was not an option. Move ahead some years to The Beatles landing
in the United States. Young girls were swooning, openly weeping
and squealing like stuck hogs (predominately with yeeeees and
yeas). Some were clapping, but most didn't seem to be. It's hard
to clap when you don't have any elbow room, and those chicks
were crammed onto the tarmac like prepubescent sardines. Again,
not a wooooo'er anywhere in the crowd that I could spot. Even in the 1970s and 1980s, the decades in
which I grew up, you simply didn't hear a lot of woooooing. I
was involved in many a throng during my misspent youth, and I
recall no woooooing. I defy you to go to any sporting event today
and not hear woooooing en masse. It doesn't matter if it's a
team full of fifth-graders, high-schoolers, college kids or seasoned
pros. The crowd, the athletes and even the coaches wooooo incessantly.
Pro golf also is big with the woooooing crowd. Close your eyes
and listen to the gallery immediately following a tee shot by
any golfer even halfway popular. The nanosecond the ball is struck,
there is a chorus of wooooos wafting from the lookers-on. (And,
by the way, if I find myself in a golf gallery when someone belts
out "You da man!" after a tee shot, I cannot be held
accountable for my actions. A murder, and I believe a justifiable
one, would be immediately forthcoming.) Is the wooooo here to stay? Who knows. Me,
I like to be different. I don't wooooo. I may clap, I may bellow
out a "yea" from time to time. Sometimes I even titter. Unless, of course, I crush the wife in Chutes and Ladders. Then I'm a woooooing fool. But that's in the privacy of my own home, and we're consenting adults. |