History "Suped up" or "Souped up", which is it?

Could the term possibly predate the supercharger?

Translated: Zog really suped up the spears and arrows with his addition of the chipped stone point. Kill ratio doubled.

 

Some times magazines get it wrong….way wrong.

 

Souper Man

 

My point was that they can and do get it wrong. ****pie World is just a bad name decision. Might the author of Souped Up heard the term and soup was his interpretation? It’s slang no matter how you look at it right?
Either way this has been very entertaining and was a nice break.

 

Do you have the publication date on that?

 

Very often, what we "sense" about things is way wrong.


Both sources below attest that the correct more common spelling is soup-up. Suped-up and sooped-up are are just misspellings. The expression is AmE in origin and it most likely derives from supercharge:

As World Wide Words notes:

Souped-up is known both in the UK and the US and was actually created in the latter country. It’s one of the longer-lived slang terms, still widely used. In its first sense, in the 1920s, souped-up specifically meant to modify a motor vehicle to increase its power and efficiency.

The earliest example I can find is this:

(here's a publication date for you, Ned)

• Speedster, cl***y, souped up ... $125. A newspaper adverti*****t by a Ford dealer in the Oakland Tribune of California, 21 Sep. 1924.

Souped-up must at root derive from super, as in supercharger. This term for a device to increase the pressure of the fuel-air mixture in an engine to improve its performance is known from 1919........ However, there’s almost certainly a connection with the foodstuff, which would account for the shift in spelling.

Soup has at times been a slang term applied to several murky liquids. If you’re a fan of American detective stories, you may know soup as a term for the nitroglycerine that was employed in safe-cracking, a slang term widely used in newspaper reports of criminal activity from about 1900 onwards (it was called soup because it was extracted from dynamite by immersing the sticks in boiling water). And it was recorded in Webster’s Dictionary in 1911 that soup was “any material injected into a horse with a view to changing its speed or temperament”.

It seems that supercharger combined with the racing and criminal senses of soup to make souped-up.

And from The Grammarist

Soup up is the phrasal verb meaning to modify something to increase its power, efficiency, or impressiveness. Soop up is a common misspelling, and supe up is a less common one (both soop and supe have rare senses that have nothing to do with increasing power or efficiency).

Soup up originated in the U.S. in the late 19th century, though it wasn’t widely used until the 20th century. Its exact origins are unknown, but it could be short for supercharge, or it might come from a horse-racing slang term for injecting horses with narcotics meant to make them run faster.1 Through the middle decades of the 20th century, it usually applied to engines, but today souped up is used in all sorts of contexts.

 

We say form follows function. But when it comes to semantics, quite often, form takes precedence. It's whatever rolls off the tongue better. Or whatever looks better in print. You've heard of artists' license. We apparently now refer to a car with a back seat and four doors as a "coupe". Sometimes, more recent history supersedes older history. Things change. Especially words. Even if the term was derived from the word supercharger, we've been saying and writing souped up for so long, that it easily and likely could have totally eclipsed the original form. And besides, it looks weird to spell it any other way.

That's okay, you guys. Rest easy. My little poem in my signature is obviously the authoritative source. If Rickybop says souped up, then that's what it be. LOL

And the coffee tastes extra good in that old tin cup.

 

But I don't care what anybody says. The fork goes on the left. Not wrapped up in the napkin in the fkn gl***.

 

I guess its probably the biggest colloquialism in our world. Soup is easier to get heads around. I don't know that I've used the term at all since my early teens. Like jacked up when the *** end is raised for tires, or completely screwed with wrong repairs or combinations. Not like we saw hot rods at the drive-in with floor Jack's under the rear axles.

There's certainly a multi-paged glossary of our **** that could be written. "Juice" for our gangs meant N2O, as did hose(d), spray, and the long version, "blue bottle tune up." We never said "noss" like that silly movie franchise but that's what many say now.

I suppose to the uninitiated some of us could be talking and they'd think we were from a foreign land, or maybe talking in CIA level code. I'd like that. But to be fair I know ZERO sports talk. I hear two guys argue about some game and (incoming colloquial) "...it's all Greek to me."

Oh yeah, I give props to @A****er Mike and his comment about Kong Jackson. That's the closest to what I may have read so long ago.

 

Siouxped.

 

I was talking to my brother one day about hot rods and engines and stuff, without considering my audience, just ripping off some numbers and colloquialisms as @theHIGHLANDER called it.

He stopped me. He said... Rick, I have no idea what you're saying.
Oops... sorry. LOL

 

IT HAS A SOUPED- UP, "FULL HOUSE", (whatever)!?

 

Proud to belong to the very large HAMB fraternity of 12 year olds

 

@Rickybop
I like your poem and coffee.

I have little to add to this conversation other than, language used to mean something.
The schools, the press , the writers of Mechanical journals, service manuals, engineering schematics, written media would, it seems to me, be inclined to use a familiar spelling of what was, essentially, a slang term. Supe and soop (as evidenced by autocorrect's need to correct me) were, likely, not real words at the term's inception.) Heck, autocorret doesn't even think autocorrect is a real term.
Point being, I can imagine copy editors meeting and painstakingly milling over the most proper word to 'reduce' supercharged down to for print. A word that was already synonymous with adding performance as fore-mentioned. 'Soup' was the proper 'concoction' and was a word, by definition, that all involved may have determined, would allow them to sleep at night.
The hot rod world called the early ones Go Jobs or Gow Jobs. The pioneers of the post-war, HAMB championed "traditional" hot rods called them Hop-ups.
And so, with that, I leave you with my own, intentionally slang ridden, poem I done ***led:

"Hop-Up Flop Up"



Peace out y'all!

 

Well, I'll admit I that I was full of BS by saying a 3/4 cam was BS. Way I always heard it told, the 3/4 cam was 3/4 down the page with the big dog race cam at the bottom. I don't know if they were actually marketed and sold as 3/4 or full race.

Saw a mention of a Winfield 3/4 spec in another thread. Heres some real specs for 3/4 and full race from several manufacturers for flatheads. Enjoy.
https://www.tildentechnologies.com/Cams/FlatheadPerformance.html

 

One of my old bosses went to a custom car lot in the early 60's, and was looking at a sharp, 46 Ford Convert. He knew the salesman was a stroke, when he said "it's got a 3/4 inch cam".

 

That's what I always thought too. It's what "Toad" woulda said about Milners car without known what it was. Well - Milners car woulda been full race cam

Now I'm interested if the cam manufacturers catalogs actually listed them as 3/4 or full race.

 

Maybe Jim, @squirrel will post a link or the pages of the 265 build he showed. Had it saved in a dead laptop. I can’t recall if it had specs or just referenced the 3/4 cam, but do think the article was from around 1960 or so.

 

I was just a wee little **** when dear ol Dad explained 3/4 cam to me. At about 13 yrs old I asked if it meant 3/4" lift (.750) and how anyone could use it. Surprised and happy I was asking that (thanks early HRM) he explained the pitch as 3/4 of the way to an all out racing cam. "That was mostly old flathead **** son." was sorta how he finished. 25yrs later I shove a .714 lift cam in my racer...

 

http://www.selectric.org/55chevy/soup.html



also, you can soup a flatty, even the little one....

 

I dunno about the rest of y'all but this topic is "souper" fun. Or super, either or. And we're covering even more from soup to nuts. Or supe to lug nuts. Or happy talk with a buncha gear nuts. Always remember beer nuts cost more than deer nuts cuz deer nuts are under a buck...

 

I like the older terms being said by those in the “know” today. 3/4 and full race cam seems to be the most used as I question the knowledge and strange look of what was a 1/4 or 1/2 cam..

The other is the use of a 50’s-60’s term of “full blown” that now is not used but I thought as a kid was a little ambiguous. My thoughts were always on wondering what a 1/2 or 3/4 blown engine would be. I knew “full” meant injected also but the term “blown and injected” was tossed around too.

I’ll-stick with “souped” for this one…..

 

Fully agree.
I did mention that earlier but no where near as eloquently.
Hopefully I’ll be a better wordsmith when I turn 13.

 

All the news about "bad lifters", do tell what the May 1955 issue told us to do.

 

Well, since you brought it up…

Nuts on the wall are walnuts.
Nuts on your chest are chestnuts.
Nuts on your chin is a mouthful of p****r

 

you asked...and there's a lot of info, they used to have thorough tech articles.

sorry for taking the thread off in another fun direction, but hey, this is the hamb, ain't it?