I bow to the previous posts on "Hoodoo". I've never heard it used in that context, but, hey, I bet there're a lot of words out there about which I could say the same if only I heard them in a context of which I had no previous experience.
I read, don't know when, about the prevalence of using existing words to describe new scientific phenomena which grew up around the 1830s onwards until about 1890. Wherever possible, anything new from science or industry was named using the Queen's English. None of that foreign muck in our language, thank you, sir! Towards the end of the century the practice was displaced by the revived - or continued - institutional torture of the Latin and Greek languages for the same purpose.
From memory, the argument went that there was a cultural inhibition against the frivolous adulteration of the language with new words, no matter how derived, which grew up out the conservative Victorian societal norms which held sway during that period, even though from an engineering and scientific perspective the same period was perhaps the richest that had ever occurred. Linguistically, the middle and later years of the 19th century were years of consolidation and descriptivism rather than of innovation. Hence the development of the OED and Websters, yadda, yadda.
Don't know whether I agree with all of it, some of it or none of it, but ... {wink]
Hoodoo
