Mark your calenders!

May 2, 2008.

I am so there.

This doesn't have anything to do with May 2nd but last night I saw a guy at the Cincinnati Bengals game holding a sign that said "Who Dey"...and I guess this is a Cincinnati thing or one of Who Dey girls fans? What's this come from? What does it mean?

It's from the Bengals' "Who Dey" chant. You know, "Who dey! Who dey! Who dey think gon' beat them Bengals! Noooooobody!"

Ring any bells? None? Ah.

Well anyway, that's the Bengals' rallying chant. It's the source of my screen name, as well as our mascot, a big Bengal tiger named Who Dey. It's been the chant since the late '70s, if memory serves.

It is a Cincinnati thing in that if you say Who Dey to pretty much anyone in town, they can identify it and immediately respond in kind.

On a side note, I am a proud owner of a Who Dey t-shirt of my very own.

OK thanks for the info. I had never heard that before. Then again, I'm not from Cincy.

sometime in the 80's we stole it, and began the Saints chant of "Who Dat? Who dat say gonna beat dem Saints?"

the funny thing is, Saints fans now say that the Bengals fans stole it, My guess it's because there hasn't been a "Who Dey" cry for so long since the Bengals were bad and nobody remembers the old days when the Bengals were going to Super bowls. But shows how bad fan memories are. Now that the Bengals are back in the national spectrum, "Who Dey" has returned.

I don't feel bad though because I think "who dat" just sounds so awesome, and fits the atmosphere down there.

Yeah, our chant is our chant and their chant is their chant.

Our chant started in 1980, in our first Super Bowl season of the decade. The Saints fans actually swiped "Who Dat?" from LSU.

The History of the Who Dey Chant.

All cool/popular chants and rally cries are stolen from college teams! Where'd the tomahawk chop (ugh) come from? Some Florida school?

Actually, ours was stolen from a commercial for a long-defunct Cincinnati car dealership. That's just the kind of city we are.

(Of course, none of this has a thing to do with the Iron Man movie and the massive geek moment I had when I saw the trailer, but whatever.)

Quote :

(Of course, none of this has a thing to do with the Iron Man movie and the massive geek moment I had when I saw the trailer, but whatever.)

Incoming un-hijack!


..... NERD!

Well uh Green Bay has "Go Pack Go"...and they chant it between this really catchy tune...it's....amazing. Original too, right?

They also have cheese. Yum. :)

whodeygal wrote:

It's from the Bengals' "Who Dey" chant. You know, "Who dey! Who dey! Who dey think gon' beat them Bengals! Noooooobody!"

Ring any bells?

Yeah, it rings a bell for me. It's a blatant ripoff of the Saints old chant of "Who Dat"...."Who dat think they gonna beat dem saints. Who Dat. Who Dat."

That was the Saints' rallying cry for many, many years. Zach is a Saints fan, so he would know, I guess, but I thought the Saints were using it from the beginning in the Archie Manning days. It does figure that Cincy stole it from LSU, New Orleans or wherever. I'm struggling to think of one thing that actually was invented in Cincinnati. Even its so-called famous hometown chili wasn't invented there.

meathorse wrote:

All cool/popular chants and rally cries are stolen from college teams! Where'd the tomahawk chop (ugh) come from? Some Florida school?

Florida State Seminoles.

Coast2Coast wrote:

Yeah, it rings a bell for me. It's a blatant ripoff of the Saints old chant of "Who Dat"...."Who dat think they gonna beat dem saints. Who Dat. Who Dat."

That was the Saints' rallying cry for many, many years. Zach is a Saints fan, so he would know, I guess, but I thought the Saints were using it from the beginning in the Archie Manning days. It does figure that Cincy stole it from LSU, New Orleans or wherever. I'm struggling to think of one thing that actually was invented in Cincinnati. Even its so-called famous hometown chili wasn't invented there.

No it is not a rip-off of the Who-Dat chant. If you had bothered to follow the link I left, you'd know that. The Saints took their chant from LSU. The Who Dey chant was adapted from a commercial for a now defunct Cincinnati car dealership.

And for your information, there have been things created in Cincinnati, beginning with most of the P&G products that flood the country and have for quite some time. Ivory soap? You're welcome.

Among those things is indeed Cincinnati-style chili. It was created here by Greek immigrants, but it was created here. Not sure where you heard that it wasn't, but your source was wrong.

I resent the implication that Cincinnati lacks the capability to be original. That is my hometown, I love it, check your facts before you disparage it next time. Thanks.

Wow. I think I found my way into a very intemperate part of this website.

Chili invented in Cincinnati? That's pretty funny. It's amazing the kind of nonsense that people will try to spout when their civic pride is at stake. Chili was first made 300 years before it came to Cincinnati...

1618 - According to an old Southwestern American Indian legend and tale (several modern writer have documented - or maybe just "passed along") it is said that the first recipe for chili con carne was put on paper in the 17th century by a beautiful nun, Sister Mary of Agreda of Spain. She was mysteriously known to the Indians of the Southwest United States as "La Dama de Azul," the lady in blue. Sister Mary would go into trances with her body lifeless for days. When she awoke from these trances, she said her spirit had been to a faraway land where she preached Christianity to savages and counseled them to seek out Spanish missionaries.

1731 - On March 9, 1731, a group of sixteen families (56 persons) arrived from the Canary Islands at Bexar, the villa of San Fernando de Béxar (now know as the city of San Antonio). They had emigrated to Texas from the Spanish Canary Islands by order of King Philip V. of Spain. The King of Spain felt that colonization would help cement Spanish claims to the region and block France's westward expansion from Louisiana. These families founded San Antonio’s first civil government which became the first municipality in the Spanish province of Texas. According to historians, the women made a spicy “Spanish” stew that is similar to chili.

1850 - Records were found by Everrette DeGolyer (1886-1956), a Dallas millionaire and a lover of chili, indicating that the first chili mix was concocted around 1850 by Texan adventurers and cowboys as a staple for hard times when traveling to and in the California gold fields and around Texas. Needing hot grub, the trail cooks came up with a sort of stew. They pounded dried beef, fat, pepper, salt, and the chile peppers together. This amounted to "brick chili" or "chili bricks" that could be boiled in pots along the trail. DeGolyer said that chili should be called "chili a la Americano" because the term chili is generic in Mexico and simply means a hot pepper. He believed that chili con carne began as the "pemmican of the Southwest."

1860 - Residents of the Texas prisons in the mid to late 1800s also lay claim to the creation of chili. They say that the Texas version of bread and water (or gruel) was a stew of the cheapest available ingredients (tough beef that was hacked fine and chiles and spices that was boiled in water to an edible consistency). The "prisoner's plight" became a status symbol of the Texas prisons and the inmates used to rate jails on the quality of their chili. The Texas prison system made such good chili that freed inmates often wrote for the recipe, saying what they missed most after leaving was a really good bowl of chili.

1880s - San Antonio was a wide-open town (a cattle town, a railroad town, and an army town) and by day a municipal food market and by night a wild and open place. An authoritative early account is provided in an article published in the July 1927 issue of Frontier Times. In this article, Frank H. Bushick, San Antonio Commissioner of Taxation, reminisces about the Chili Queens and their origin at Military Plaza before they were moved to Market Square in 1887.

1890 - Chili historians are not exactly certain who first "invented" chili powder. It is agreed that the inventors of chili powder deserve a slot in history close to Alfred Nobel (1933-1896), inventor of dynamite.

The Fort Worth chili buffs give credit to DeWitt Clinton Pendery. Pendery arrived in Fort Worth, Texas in 1870. By 1890, after his grocery store burned down, he started selling his own unique blend of chiles to cafes, hotels, and citizens under the name of Mexican Chili Supply Company.

1922 - Cincinnati style chili was created in 1922 by a Macedonian immigrant, Tom (Athanas) Kiradjieff. He settled in Cincinnati with his brother, John, and opened a hot dog stand with Greek food called the Empress, only to do a lousy business because nobody there at the time knew anything about Greek food. So, it is said, that they called their spaghetti chili. He created a chili made with Middle Eastern spices which could be served a variety of ways. His "five-way" was a concoction of a mound of spaghetti topped with chili, then with chopped onion, then red kidney beans, then shredded yellow cheese, and served with oyster crackers and a side order of hot dogs topped with shredded cheese.

Oh yes. The who dat/who dey was first? Cincinnati was only about 80 years behind on that one. Google and Wikipedia are your friends. Facts are easily checked.

The chant of "Who dat? Who dat say they gonna beat dem Saints" originated in minstrel shows and vaudeville acts of the late 1800s and early 1900s, and was then taken up by jazz and big band performers in the 1920s and 30s.

The first reference to "Who Dat?" can be found in the 19th Century. A featured song in E.E. Rice's "Summer Night's" is the song "Who Dat Say Chicken In dis Crowd."

"Who dat?" was used as a tag line that has been around since the days of Negro minstrel shows. "Who dat?" "Who dat say who dat?" Many different black-faced gags played off that opening.

One example is an old 1930s Harmon-Ising cartoon musical on Turner Classic Movies which included caracatures of Fats Waller, Cab Calloway, Bill "Bojangles" Robinson, Ethel Waters, and the Mills Brothers. Called "Swing Wedding," the cartoon seldom sees the light of day because it's viewed as racist in its portrayal of blacks. They were frogs in a swamp, doing minstral show jokes and cutting loose with jazz tunes. The frogs repeatedly used the phrase "who dat?"

In the swing era, "who dat" chants back and forth between the band and the band leader or between the audience and the band were extemporaneous...made up on the spot. That is, there was no one specific set of words except for the two magic ones.

Staged minstrel skits had frightened black people saying "who dat" when they encountered a ghost, or someone imitating a ghost. Then, the "who dat"..."who dat say who dat"...skit would play itself out. You'll see this skit done frequently in short reels from the 1930s - 1950s and in some early TV shows too. Even the Marx Brothers had a "who dat" routine. Often, a ghost was called a "who dat." An animated character, now banished to the archives as being racist, MGM's Bosko had such an encounter in a toon called "Lil Ol Bosko in Bagdad" in 1938.

"Who Dat?" became a familiar joke with soldiers during World War II.
Back in WWII, US fighter squadron pilots would often fly under radio silence. But things get lonely up there in the cockpit, so after a while there'd be a crackle of static as someone keyed his mike. Then a disembodied voice would reply, "Who dat?" An answer would come, "Who dat say who dat?" And another, "Who dat say who dat say who dat?" After a few rounds of this, the squadron commander would grab his microphone and yell, "Cut it out, you guys!" A few moments of silence. Then... "Who dat?"

Finally, it was adapted by Southern University and New Orleans Public Schools in the 1960s, and Saints fans adopted it in the early 1970s. It was also adopted by wrestling fans of the Junkyard Dog, who wrestled locally in the Mid South Wrestling area in the early 1980s.
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Different theories of the origin of the chant "Who Dey" exist. One possible source is a 1980 commercial for Red Frazier Ford of Cincinnati, which used this tagline: “Who's going to give you a better deal than Red Frazier? Nobody!” Cincinnati fans who had seen the commercial many times may have just copied it when cheering.

The point of origin that has been disputed on a local Cincinnati radio station is that the phrase came due to a locally distributed beer at the time called Hudepohl. It is said that as beer vendors went up and down aisles at the Bengals games during their first run at the Super Bowl, instead of yelling out "Beer here!" or some other call to let fans know that they had beer, they would yell out "Hudy!" as an abbreviation of Hudepohl.

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So whether it was a car dealer or beer vendors hawking Hudy, it was first used in Cincinnati in 1980, nearly a century after Who Dat had been used in many different ways in Louisiana, 40 years after fighter pilots had used it in WW II, and nearly a decade after Saints fans had begun using it to cheer their team.

Facts are indeed a beautiful thing. And I do check them. Thoroughly.

Yes, I know.....Your chili is not like other chili. And your chant is different from the other chant. You can hang on to that small piece of questionable uniqueness if you like. If this were a patent suit, though, to determine first use and origination, you wouldn't have a leg to stand on.

Ha ha. Everyone's wrong about everything.
U R all dum.

Okay Dude, nowhere did I ever say that chili was invented in Cincinnati. Do you know how freakin' dumb a statement like that would be? Even I, with a penchant for sometimes running my mouth half-cocked, would never say an outright retarded thing like that. I said that Cincinnati-style chili was created in Cincinnati, which it was, as even you showed. Hence the name. Pay attention.

Secondly, while I will give you the point for showing that "Who Dat?" was not lifted from LSU, your little history lesson doesn't show that "Who Dey?" was lifted from that. It wouldn't be the first time that two similar things developed independently from one other, by a long shot. My original point was that one is one and the other is the other and just because they're similar doesn't mean that there was theft, and I stand by that.

Wait a second...so "Cincinnati-style" chili was made in Cincinnati? Brilliant.

I made 1150 Jackson Ave, apt B style chili last night.
It was fucking awesome.

nice to see Coast2Coast engage in a friendly debate

I had read the Wiki when whodeygirl posted this to begin with, after I posted that I thought we had stole it, not really knowing the history--I don't even think my dad knew...we just said "who dat" a lot in the late 80's...(although incidentally, the...49ers, the Eagles, and the Vikings could all say...they could beat them saints).

So now I know the history of "who dat" and it's one of those things that I'll never really need to explain to anyone...but would most likely do so in a bar after having a few beers, to someone sitting next to me...and they'll most likely walk away.

Now that the Aints are back though...I won't find myself in too many bars...