I’ve been asked for the origin of the expression ‘wild and woolly.’
According to the Oxford English Dictionary it means ‘barbarous and lacking in culture.’
This is American in origin (does that surprise you?), and the story is that it comes from the days of the American wild west on account of its primitive and uncivilized character.
Which is all well and good as far as it goes.
And that certainly explains the ‘wild’—but where does the ‘woolly’ come from?
The answer is (according to the Phrase Finder website) the Californian Gold Rush era of the 1850s.
A US publication The Protestant Episcopal Quarterly Review and Church Register of 1855, included a reference to the ‘wild and woolly-haired Negrillo’ which is almost there.
The first example the website provides of the precise phrase in print is in the Missouri newspaper The Sedalia Daily Democrat, December 1875 in a story about someone called William Palmer, of South Bend, Indiana, who was a murderer.
It says ‘Bill always was one of the “wild and woolly” kind...’
And the fact that they put the phrase in quotation marks indicates that it was still a new (and unfamiliar) phrase.
The Oxford quotes from a book called Rangers and Pioneers of Texas (from 1884)—and here’s the quote: ‘Occasionally, in some Western village, you will hear a voice ring out on the night air “Wild and woolly” and then you may expect a few shots from a revolver. It is a cowboy out on a little spree.’
It’s not entirely clear (at least to me) where the ‘woolly’ part comes in, but America’s pioneering cowboy days are the source of the expression.
One final thought—there is a suggestion that during cold nights on the prairie cowboys would wear jackets made of lamb’s wool, and it may be that the prevalence of these jackets contributed to the phrase.
It’s a possibility.
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