Dialogue: Gordon McLauchlan

Where loopy doesn't mean you've gone round the twist

By GORDON MCLAUCHLAN

Last year, in the course of research for a magazine article, I visited Akaroa where some women on local night at the pub tried to pull my leg. I reckoned in the subsequent story that they regarded me as a "loopie," a South Islanders' term for tourists, including North Islanders.

The so-called local night is held on Thursdays because of the weekend influx of bach-owners from Christchurch, who nearly double the population. Even they are regarded as outsiders, if not quite loopies. But it was all good fun.

I subsequently wrote: "No one is sure exactly when the word was coined but the Dictionary of New Zealand English has traced it back to 1970 when it was used by hotel staff at Milford Sound. No one knows the word's derivation or precisely what it means, except that it's gently derogatory."

Well, of course, it's always foolish to write "no one knows," so the letters poured in. Said one correspondent: "It ('loopies') described the people, usually overseas visitors or Aucklanders, who flew into Christchurch, got on a coach and were driven over several days around the 'Loop'," which, he said, took in the West Coast, Milford Sound, the Southern Lakes and mountains and the Canterbury Plains before returning to Christchurch."

This view was supported by a number of other letters and I was lulled into semantical slumber - from which I was suddenly roused by a letter from Hokitika, one of the more interesting towns on that southern loop. This correspondent said "loopie" was derived from a Scottish dialect word, "louper," synonymous with "leaper," used to describe the leaping of rabbits from one place to another, "a feature in common with English visitors to Scotland in earlier days of tourism."

I checked with the Oxford and the thot plickened. One of their many definitions of "loopy" is "crafty, deceitful" and its derivation given as "Sc ?" - which means "probably Scottish." It quotes from Walter Scott's Redgauntlet of 1824: "When I tauld him how this loopy lad, Alan Fairford, had served me, he said I might bring an action on the case." Which sheds little light on the meaning to me.

The OED also defines the word as having the slang meaning of "crazy, cracked" since 1925, and among the substantiating quotes is one from our very own Ian Cross' The God Boy: "Honestly, the pair of them were looking at me as though I was loopy." I can vouch for that, having used "loopy" many times in earlier days as a synonym for "round the bend, mad as a snake" and "fruitcake."

Nowhere, though, does the OED refer to the aerial habits of rabbits.

Returning to Harry Orsman's wonderful Dictionary of New Zealand English, I found another suggested geographical origin. It quotes Geoff Chapple in the Listener in 1984: "We thought it [loopies] must have come from 'loopy', meaning wrong in the head, but sources in the southern heartland assure us that the term almost certainly derives from tourists' propensity for taking the loop road in any given area, with the general idea of seeing more of the countryside."

The DNZE also quotes a Stewart Islander on the subject: "It refers to the peculiar looping motion of the hand while swatting sandflies and to the 'loopy' questions they ask." This embraces the two meanings of "visitor" and "loony."

Interestingly, the DNZE does not refer to the South Island tourist loop that most of my correspondents claim is the true derivation.

So take your choice from the several theories - that South Islanders call people loopies because they observed them looping their island, taking scenic loop roads, swatting sandflies, or jumping about like rabbits. Or do they just think we're all crazy up here?

Agreement generally prevails on the Milford Sound origin of the modern usage, so my hunch is they did notice many of their guests were looping the South Island, and the word loopy had a nicely derogatory tone to it, given its main usage then as "crazy."

For a small, isolated community it was a way of taking the mickey. I have noticed, though, that the further south you go, the more contemptuously the word is used; until, I've been told, it's spat out on Stewart Island.

But southern hospitality and friendliness are very real and if down there they take the mickey by calling us loopies to the backs of their hands, we up here are big enough to take it with a laugh and a shrug.