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Hickey

From the link below:

"So where did the word “doohickey” actually come from? As with most words, it’s difficult to say when exactly people started using the term, but as for documented instances, it first appeared in the November 12, 1914 edition of Our Navy magazine, where it states, “We were compelled to christen articles beyond our ken with such names as ‘do-hickeys’, ‘gadgets’ and ‘gilguys’.”

(Incidentally, “gilguy” seems to be a much older term than placeholder names like doodad and doohickey, with the first documented instance appearing in Spunyarn & Spindrift- A Sailor Boy’s Log by Robert Brown in 1886, where Brown also notes one of the first known instances of “gadget”- “Then the names of all the other things on board a ship! I don’t know half of them yet; even the sailors forget at times, and if the exact name of anything they want happens to slip from their memory, they call it a chicken⁓fixing, or a gadjet, or a gill-guy, or a timmey-noggy, or a wim-wom—just pro tem., you know.”)

In any event, doohickey soon spread to being used by airman as well, with it noted in Edward Fraser & John Gibbons’ 1925 Soldier & Sailor Words that “doo hickey” was “an airman’s term for small, detachable fittings.” Within a couple decades of this, the word was being used widely throughout America as a placeholder name for anything one couldn’t remember the name of.


As for how the early 20th century seamen seem to have come up with “doohickey,” it is thought that it probably derives from “doodad,” which has uncertain origin, but first popped up in documented form about a decade before “doohickey,” with doodad meaning “a superfluous ornament.”

The sailors thus are thought to have simply meshed this term with “hickey,” which, according to the 1909 edition of Webster’s New International Dictionary meant “a device for bending a conduit, consisting of an iron pipe used as a handle fitted at one end with a tee through which the conduit is passed; (b) a small fitting used in wiring for electric lights, a fixture piped for gas.”

By, 1913 (and likely even before) “hickey” appears to have been given the expanded definition of referring to any tool one couldn’t remember the name of and later to anything at all one needed a placeholder name for, as outlined in a 1928 document from the Michigan Academy of Science and Arts: “Hickie, a word applicable to anything whose name one does not remember, ‘what’s its name’.”

As to who specifically first coined the term “doohickey,” this has been lost to history, but given the definitions of “doodad” and “hickey” around the time the term was first uttered, it seems a fairly natural combination when referring to some device that you can’t remember the name of in a given moment or just one whose name is too obscure for most people to know, requiring a placeholder name such as doohickey, doodad, doojigger, thingamawhatsit, watchamacallit, thingummy, gadget, widget, gilguy, etc.

And at this point if you’re wondering where the word “hickey” came from, this isn’t known. As for when it came to commonly mean a “skin blemish,” this first started around the late 1920s or early 1930s, mostly referring to pimples and later expanding the definition from there, with one early instance appearing in the May 2, 1937 edition of Ten-Story Love Magazine where it notes in an advertisement, “Hickies spoil everything. I know. I had ’em until I began eating Fleischmann’s yeast.” Not long after this, “hickey” also began being used by printers to refer to various blemishes in engravings and the like."

 
In and old history book I run across a statement referring to a hickey/ Does anyone know if it is the same as a token ? Used for card games and pool. Time goes on and the past is forgotten.
It appears the hickey as in your old book for card games and billiards is not an object like a token, but rather refers to a penalty or foul.

"
Each team does a tally for Game point with the winner having the most points in their pile. Both face cards and 10's of any suit are counted for points according to the following point system: 10= 10 points, Ace= 4 points, King= 3 points, Queen= 2 points, Jack= 1 point. In the event of a tie, the Joker acts as the winning tie-breaker. If there is no Joker in play, no game point is awarded for the tie.

If the bidding team makes less than their bid, they are set, or "hickeyed", and subtract the bid from their overall score. A star is placed next to the current score to denote a hickey. Scores never go below zero. Play continues until a team reaches 11 points. In the event that both teams have 11 or more points, the bidding team of the final round wins even if the non-bidding team has more points.

A separate list is maintained for keeping track of overall wins and losses of each player individually. Each winning player earns +$1.00 (or +1 if playing points only) and each losing player -$1.00. If the winning team had hickeys, these are not penalized. However, if the losing team had hickeys, each losing player loses another $1.00 per hickey, and each winning player gains $1.00. In this way, the total for the entire list should always equal zero. At the end of all play, for example at the end of a week long vacation, a winner is declared and everyone is paid out."

In some billiard games, for example Golf Billiards, the term hickey is used as a penalty for a foul.
 
Her wording was( Matt Cooper, the town barber and billiard parlor owner,( I have a hickey which was used for card games and pool ) bought a Model T for 492.45. /
I have found a number of the tokens from this pool hall so I was thinking there was possibly a connection. ? Thanks for comments Steve.
 
Her wording was( Matt Cooper, the town barber and billiard parlor owner,( I have a hickey which was used for card games and pool ) bought a Model T for 492.45. /
I have found a number of the tokens from this pool hall so I was thinking there was possibly a connection. ? Thanks for comments Steve.
That does sound like a sort of poker chip, 1goldsniper.

Here's something that maybe matches that...
thumbnail.jpg
 
Her wording was( Matt Cooper, the town barber and billiard parlor owner,( I have a hickey which was used for card games and pool ) bought a Model T for 492.45. /
I have found a number of the tokens from this pool hall so I was thinking there was possibly a connection. ? Thanks for comments Steve.
From the price of the Model T, goldsniper, the year is 1917 to 1920. Any other clues in your book about Matt Cooper's billiard parlor, location or other?

a good link here about billiard tokens:
 
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