“Hey, you sass that hoopy Ford Prefect? There’s a frood who really knows where his towel is.”

This is all just like, my opinion man, but I cringe every time I see or hear someone say “froody.” To my mind the word “frood” is a noun, and “hoopy” is an adjective. I know, I know, Douglas tells it right in the text that “hoopy” is defined as a really together guy, we’ll come back around to this. In context of use, the word frood definitively means “really amazingly together guy.” It is used to refer to a person.

Sure, the case can be made that by saying something is froody” that you are saying it has the qualities of a frood; But let me ask you this: Do you feel cool saying it? Not typing it someplace on the net, but actually verbalizing the word in a sentence?

Go try it now, call someone.

It has not left my memory that some of you may be so unhip that your bums due to fall off, so let me give you a quick lesson on being cool, don’t say froody. We can work on this together folks, but it’s a tough universe out there. If you are going to survive you have to be able to talk the talk and in this case there isn’t a fish you can put in your ear to help.

Cool is in context, when you make words you should feel good about them, not regret them three days later in the shower, or while awake in bed bereft of sleep because you know you really blew it when you told that friend about the really froody bar.

Tell them the bar was hoopy. Tell them the bar was muy hoopy. Tell them it was zarkin’ shiny if you want to double down on the sci-fi verbiage. But brothers and sisters of the towel, don’t tell them it was froody if you don’t want people to think you’re a strag. And what the frak were you doing in a bar? There’s a smegging pandemic going on, you may have heard? If I don’t get to go to the bar neither should you.

Disclaimer from Galactic Hitchhikers: Zaxely Nash is definately not as cool as he thinks he is, but nobody should tell him. 

As Douglas Adams lays it down for us, “hoopy” is defined as a “really together guy.” So noun too, right? Well yes, but again, not if you want to sound cool. It’s better commonly used as an adjective. Ford is described as being hoopy, not being a hoopy.

In all my years of Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy fanaticism I have only once heard someone address people as “hoopies” once and pull it off as cool. That someone was 2020 Worst Dressed Sentient Being in the Known Universe Contest runner up, Verbz, in his 2021 Towel Day Ambassador Contest video. He pulls it off by proceeding it with the Earth term “Sup,” then says “hoopies, froods,” and boxes it to go with the demeanor of a guy who definitely knows where his towel is at.

You CAN use hoopy as a noun, as illustrated, but it becomes about the delivery. How you say it, what words you wrap it together with. It takes a certain swagger, a certain je ne sais quoi of cool. You have to really have it, savvy, it can’t be faked. Sometimes it can be learned and then faked, e.g. my whole theory on overcoming social anxieties, but that is just veering off topic.

Trust me froods, if you are at the sort of party where the hostess’ undergarments leap one foot simultaneously to the left in accordance with the theory of indeterminacy, don’t say that it was froody. You won’t find yourself invited to the next shin-dig.