In "Loving Las Vegas" for Harper's Magazine, Colson Whitehead uses hurly burly when he writes about a summer stint splitting a Let's Go travel writing assignment among three friends. 

Hurly-Burly is a reduplicative word, meaning it's made up of two synonymous words linked in some phonetic way. Read Orin Hargraves's Bonbon Mots for more on reduplicative vocabulary including pooh-pooh, hoity-toity, willy-nilly, namby-pamby, dilly-dally, and wishy-washy.

Forgive yourself if even silently reading that list makes you feel like you're channeling a Victorian nursemaid's gentle chiding. As Hargraves points out, "a large proportion of English reduplications do indeed denote something trivial, nonsensical, disparaged, substandard, [or] silly."

There's nothing silly about hurly-burly's origin. In fact, it's brutal. According to the Online Etymological Dictionary, hurling was a 14th century word meaning a "commotion, tumult," and "the hurling time" was a phrase used to describe the Peasant's Revolt of 1381, when, to object to a new tax, a man named Wat Tyler marched from Canterbury to London, where he was killed by servants of the King and had his head displayed on a pole over London Bridge.

In the 1530s, hurling was joined to burling to form hurlingburling, which was later shortened to hurly-burly, and — Braveheart associations worn away by time — stood ready and waiting for Colson Whitehead's thrift store-enhanced Vegas debut.