Colson Whitehead on the "Hurly-Burly" of Downtown Vegas

In "Loving Las Vegas" for Harper's Magazine, Colson Whitehead uses hurly burly when he writes about a summer stint splitting a Let's Go travel writing assignment among three friends. 

It was 1991. We’d just been diagnosed as Generation X, and certainly we had all the symptoms, our designs and life plans as scrawny and undeveloped as our bodies.…We’d hit Domsey’s, the famous Brooklyn thrift store, before we left New York City. We required proper gear for our Vegas debut. Dead men’s spats, ill-fitting acrylic slacks and blazers with stiff fibers sticking out of the joints and seams. Roll up the sleeves of the sports jacket to find the brown stains corresponding to the previous owner’s track marks....We were about to get our first glimpse of the hurly-burly of downtown Vegas. 

Hurly-Burly is a reduplicative word, meaning it's made up of two synonymous words linked in some phonetic way. Read Orin Hargraves's Bonbon Mots for more on reduplicative vocabulary including pooh-pooh, hoity-toity, willy-nilly, namby-pamby, dilly-dally, and wishy-washy.

Forgive yourself if even silently reading that list makes you feel like you're channeling a Victorian nursemaid's gentle chiding. As Hargraves points out, "a large proportion of English reduplications do indeed denote something trivial, nonsensical, disparaged, substandard, [or] silly."

There's nothing silly about hurly-burly's origin. In fact, it's brutal. According to the Online Etymological Dictionary, hurling was a 14th century word meaning a "commotion, tumult," and "the hurling time" was a phrase used to describe the Peasant's Revolt of 1381, when, to object to a new tax, a man named Wat Tyler marched from Canterbury to London, where he was killed by servants of the King and had his head displayed on a pole over London Bridge.

In the 1530s, hurling was joined to burling to form hurlingburling, which was later shortened to hurly-burly, and — Braveheart associations worn away by time — stood ready and waiting for Colson Whitehead's thrift store-enhanced Vegas debut.