Yahoo (literature)

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A Yahoo is a legendary being in the novel Gulliver's Travels (1726) by Jonathan Swift.

Swift describes the yahoos as vile and savage creatures, filthy and with unpleasant habits, resembling human beings far too closely for the liking of protagonist 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 yowie, a giant creature from Australian myth and folklore, may have been taken from Swift's Yahoos.

American frontiersman Daniel Boone^[1] claimed that he killed a hairy giant that he called a Yahoo. Boone often used terms from Gulliver's Travels.

Yahoos were referenced in some of letters the killer called "Son of Sam" sent to New York City police in the 1970s.