Complete nonsense, total rubbish. The precise origin of the slangy noun hooey has been lost, but its meaning dates from the early 1900s. Elmer Rice had a version of it in his Pulitzer Prize–winning play, Street Scene (1928): “T’hell with all that hooey.” James M. Cain virtually defined it in The Postman Always Rings Twice (1934): “It’s just a lot of hooey that this guy thought up so that he could fool the judge.”