Vuvuzela: what was it called in American English before the 2010 World Cup in South Africa?

FIFA World Cup 2010, South Africa. The excitement. The tension. The constant sound of buzzing bees.

And every one kept talking about this crazy new instrument the 'vuvuzela' making all this noise, so exotic and colorful; even the word is wild.

Except that the instrument is totally well-known, at least in the US and at football games, and has been for as long as I can remember. Kids would come back from most any sporting event (ones where you'd take kids with either a pennant, a jersey, a ball, some sparkly thing, or ... well, this thing we currently call a vuvuzela.

What was this plastic trumpet thing called before the -word- 'vuvuzela' appeared? Was it so generically called a 'plastic trumpet'? Is that how impoverished things were vocabulary-wise that we had no more evocative term for it, making it so easy for vuvuzela to take over? So impoverished that I don't think there was even a word at all; we just pointed. Even the vendors may not have known, they just sold those things when people pointed at them. "We're almost sold out of ...those things... We'll be getting a box of ...those things in a few minutes?"

What did we call ... it before summer 2010?

Solution 1:

I had one of these as a child, and as I recall we just called it a "plastic trumpet".

As this illustrates, not everything has a unique name. In particular, for people outside South Africa those buzzy plastic horns were simply not common or salient enough to warrant a their own non-generic label until very recently. It took a particular event to make most people aware of them as something significant and name-worthy, and when the need for a name arose we simply borrowed vuvuzela from the region where the trumpets had been notable for longer.

Solution 2:

The toy (plastic) trumpet is simply a modern, mass-market replacement for a real vuvuzela. The design is based on a European "natural trumpet", such as one might still see played at a period instrument Baroque concert.

A vuvuzela was traditionally an antelope horn (specifically, a kudu horn), similar to the ram's-horn shofar used in Jewish ceremonies. The word already existed when the plastic horn came along.

We see the instrument as a plastic trumpet; they see it as a plastic vuvuzela. It makes a racket, but compared to the original it saves n/2 antelope lives (where n is the number of attendees at the stadium).

Solution 3:

The plastic horn-like thing sold at sporting events for noise making in the US is named by the sellers as a

stadium horn.

It is called by normal people as just a 'horn', 'trumpet', 'plastic horn', or 'plastic trumpet'. Functionally it has been replaced by the easier to use but somewhat more annoying 'air-horn' which only exercises your thumb, and because of its inner-ear-cilia-stripping action, is only ever fun to use once.