Green’s Dictionary of Slang

rubbish, nonsense.

1912		in J.L. Kornbluh Rebel Voices (1964) 76: Same old hooey in St. Looie; / And all the more in Baltimore.
1928		J.P. McEvoy Showgirl 46: Oh boy, what a lot of hooey!
1932		E.S. Gardner ‘Bird in the Hand’ in Goulart (1967) 266: That’s a line of hooey the lawyer thought up for the judge.
1937		(con. 1905–25) E.H. Sutherland Professional Thief (1956) 92: Meaningless verbiage, hooey and subterfuge.
1942		P. Wylie Generation of Vipers 294: The church insists that people adopt its values [...] Prohibition, and other hooey.
1955		‘Blackie’ Audett Rap Sheet 202: They done it just to prove that all the stories that had been in the papers was hooey.
1964		J. Gelber On Ice 281: Or is that a bunch of hooey, too?
1977		R. Coover Public Burning (1979) 529: All this crap about fascism is a lotta hooey, and you know it!
1989		H. Rawson Dict. of Invective (1991) 197: hooey. Nonsense.
1994		B. Fallowell One Hot Summer in St Petersburg 56: The origin of the phrase ‘a load of old hooey’: in the addendum to the Oxford English Dictionary, it says of this word US slang I924. Origin unknown.
1997		M.M. Bossley Taking a Dive 43: I never thought any of that hooey-balooey stuff worked, but maybe I was wrong.
2004		(con. 1960s-70s) T. Taylor Top Fellas 43/2: The media piled on the hype and hooey.
2005		J. Stahl I, Fatty 138: A lot of that stuff [i.e. publicity] was studio hooey.
2017		Denver Post 24 Jan. 🌐 He Who Is Smarter than Those With Intelligence delivers 16 minutes of hooey and horse hockey about corrupt politicians betraying the people.