hooligan, hooliganism The work ‘hooligan’ emerged in the late 1890s and literally meant gangs of rowdy youths. But as Geoff Pearson demonstrates in Hooligan: A History of Respectable Fears (1983), the term also encapsulated wider anxieties about the state of the nation's youth and the breakdown of traditions of order and stability in late Victorian England. Fears about hooligans, their territorial gang fights, and their distinctive dress style went hand in hand with anxieties ranging from the failure to instil stable work habits among working-class youths, and perceived decline in the national character, to the lowered morality of the new ‘city type’ or urban degenerate. The destruction of what were held to have been previously stable traditions of family and community, resulting in hooliganism and widespread juvenile delinquency, was to become a common background theme informing a number of schemes (including the Boy Scout movement) to reclaim the hooligans. Hooliganism, then and now, is almost invariably seen as an entirely unprecedented and alien phenomenon—as well as a threat to the ‘British way of life’. For a classic account of moral panics and the processes which generate other folk devils such as Teddy Boys and Hell's Angels see S. Cohen , Folk Devils and Moral Panics (1972
).

hoo·li·gan / ˈhoōləgin/ • n. a violent young troublemaker, typically one of a gang.DERIVATIVES: hoo·li·gan·ism / -ˌnizəm/ n.ORIGIN: late 19th cent.: perhaps from Hooligan, the surname of a fictional rowdy Irish family in a music-hall song of the 1890s, also of a character in a cartoon.

hooligan XIX. of unkn. orig.