Yahoo (literature)

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In Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift, a Yahoo is a vile and savage creature, filthy and with unpleasant habits, resembling human beings far too closely for the liking of Lemuel Gulliver, who finds the calm and rational society of the Houyhnhnms far preferable. The Yahoos are primitive creatures obsessed with "pretty stones" they find by digging in mud, thus representing the distasteful materialism and ignorant elitism Swift encountered in Britain. Hence the term "Yahoo" has become synonymous with "cretin," "dinosaur," and/or "Neanderthal."

The name of the yowie of Australian myth may have been taken from Swift's Yahoos originally. Daniel Boone claimed that he killed a hairy giant that he called a Yahoo. Boone often used terms from Gulliver's Travels.

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