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Here's one for you: I live in Pennsylvania, but I go surfing in New Jersey all the time during the summer. My buddies there keep calling me "shoobie." They're not really mean or anything, they're probably just dicking me around, but they still won't tell me what it is except to say it's like a tourist or non-local or something. What the hell is a "shoobie"? Should I be pissed?
asked by Fran
Jersey native and legendary East Coast photographer Dick Meseroll responds:
"Shoobies is definitely a tourist term -- one of several actually. None of them are positive, but they're not necessarily evil. From what I'm told, the tourists that come down to the northern part of the Jersey Shore are referred to as "bennies." Legend has it -- and I've heard this from my mother, my father, and a few other people -- back at the turn of the century, when people were ill, it was often prescribed that you go out in the sun to get the beneficial rays, and that was apparently shortened into "bennies." So that's the lore on that one. Nowadays it's a slur and people have big "Go home bennies" parties Labor Day weekend. It's like bumper-to-bumper traffic with folks leaving town, so people hang sheets out in front of their houses and sit out on the front porch drinking beer and yelling, "Go home, get out of here!" That's in like Ocean and Monmouth Counties, and maybe even the next island you might hear that.
And then when you down to the mid-zone like LBI (Long Beach Island), Atlantic City -- maybe even down to Cape May -- they used to call them "fudgies," because tourists would go to the Atlantic City and a couple other boardwalks and the big thing was to go to all the penny candy stores and buy fudge by the pound. So they became "fudgies." And now it's like, "Oh, that guy's a fudgy." [laughs] Have fun with that one.
But "shoobies" may be the weirdest one. It's also popular around Atlantic City and Cape May -- which is a huge tourist area about an hour south of Atlantic City -- and it developed between the turn of the century through the 1940s. Back then, people came to the beach all dressed up in a tie and jacket 'cause the bathing attire -- well, you've seen the photos, people didn't run around in their suits like today. So, they would come down with fully dressed, and they would bring their shoes and they would take their shoes off and put them in their shoeboxes. So the tourists would be walking around the beach with shoeboxes. It was an easy mark, and the name basically stuck, which is why you're still being called a shoobie today.
And that's basically the, uh, etymology of Jersey tourist slang right there. I'm sure there could be a few more little local ones but those are the biggies."
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