Perhaps I'm too wrapped up in the television commercials I watch, but I feel moved by the plight of the pepper shaker in the Knorr ads who posts tiny signs on the bases of lampposts begging for information about his lost friend, the salt shaker.
And, although it's beyond creepy that a disembodied pair of blood-red lips in a Dairy Queen commercial would use "bacon" as a verb, and then ask, "Did I just use 'bacon' as a verb?", it's refreshing that even disembodied pairs of lips are conscious of syntax and prepared to second-guess their word choices.
However, one has to wonder what image advertisers have of their customers. In a commercial for Trident, a man likes his stick of gum so much he marries it and takes it on holiday. So, no mental instability there. In a spot for Chips Ahoy, a sadistic hand plucks happy, singing cookies out of a moving car, one by one. The viewer is meant to identify with the hand.
Most puzzling is the Honda Civic commercial in which a driver is inordinately impressed with his car's mileage. "Whoop!" he yells at his friend in the passenger seat. The friend, mentally calculating how serious a tumble he'd take if he opened the passenger door and leapt out, hesitantly replies, "Awesome." "No, that's not the part," the driver cries, and shouts again: "Whoop!" The friend gamely replies, "Whoop." "No," shouts the driver.
Part of me wondered whether Honda views Civic drivers as sociopaths who treat conversation as an opportunity to berate their companions. The other part wondered what the passenger was supposed to reply, other than, "Could you please stop the car and let me out? I just remembered I'm supposed to walk 20 kilometres a day."
If the word were "whoomp" or "whoot," the answer might be, "There it is." The group Tag Team had a hit with the party song Whoomp! There It Is in 1993. The group 95 South had a hit the same year with a different song called Whoot, There It Is, the object of that "whoot" being attractive rear ends sighted on the street or on the dance floor. The expressions may have originated in the clubs of Atlanta.
Whoop was being used as a verb before 1400. John Palsgrove wrote in 1530, "Whooppe a lowed, and thou shalte here hym blowe his horne." The word was imitative, sounding like the cry it describes. Lawrence Durrell similarly used "whoom" in 1936 to suggest a rushing sound: "Wild pigeon whoomed over." (That would be a whoom with a view.)
The Oxford English Dictionary traced "whoompf" to 1958, defining it as the sound made "when a quantity of flammable material bursts into flames." It found "whoomph" as early as 1955, in a mention of "the 'Whoomph,' 'Boomph' of a bomb."
A character in Stephen Crane's 1895 novel The Red Badge of Courage shouted, "Whoop-a-dadee, here were are! Everybody fightin'." The more common "whoop-de-do," which as a noun refers to a commotion and as an interjection indicates boredom, appears in William Faulkner's 1929 novel The Sound and the Fury: "But I can't have all this whoop-de-do and sulking at mealtimes."
Presumably the driver's friend in the Civic was not supposed to reply to "Whoop!" with "Big whoop," since that, like "big deal" and "whoop-de-do," is a deflating comment indicating the subject at hand is anything but a big deal.
Maybe Honda knows what should follow whoop, or maybe it is teasing us. For my part, I side with the passenger who thought whoop should follow whoop. It did just that in Christian Bök's book Eunoia, in the chapter that made "o" its only vowel. "Hot to trot, two blonds who smooch now romp on cold wood floors for crowds of morons, most of whom hoot or howl: whoop whoop."