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The Virginia Tech Hokies have been in the news lately due to the success of their football team. Finally, they ended up losing to Florida State in the National Championship game. Instead of trying to settle the game on the field, perhaps Virginia Tech should have tried quizzing the Seminole football team on the origin of the word Hokie. That's a battle they might have won. To begin our quest, we did a Yahoo! search on the word Hokie and got the Virginia Tech Athletics category. Browsing to the Athletics main page, we clicked on the link for hokiesportsinfo.com. After some trial and error, we spied a link to Hokie Spirit. From there, we
were able to get to the bottom of the whole Hokie mess. We found the answer on a page entitled, "What's a Hokie?" It turns out a Hokie isn't anything at all, and has nothing to do with that orange and maroon bird mascot. It's a made-up word that was added to an 1896 football cheer by a student named O.M. Stull, simply because it sounded good. It wound up becoming the nickname for all Virginia Tech teams. Out of curiosity, we tried to find out more about Stull and his famous cheer. This time, we went to Virginia Tech's main page and searched on "What is a Hokie." The first result gave us exactly what we were looking for. For your added enjoyment, here's the
Old Hokie cheer:
Hoki, Hoki, Hoki, Hy.
Techs, Techs, V.P.I.
Sola-Rex, Sola-Rah.
Polytechs - Vir-gin-ia.
Rae, Ri, V.P.I. While it may not roll off the tongue, this perplexing, meaningless word is still grabbing our attention over one hundred years later. How hokey is that?
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