re: #53 Decatur Deb

I can remember when “honkey” broke into the language. Being from Pittsburgh, I wondered what Stokely had against Hungarians.

Obliquely related tangent:

My dad lived the first ~decade or so of his life in Missouri, raised by his mother and grandmother. For possibly relevant context, he was born in 1928, and his mother was born in 1904. As far back as I can remember, my dad used to throw around the word “honyock” (rhymes with “fawn block”). As far as I could tell, the term was slightly derisive, but there wasn’t anything especially malicious about it. From context, I inferred that a “honyock” was a word applied to someone behaving foolishly as a matter of habit, thereby causing annoyance. For example, bad drivers might be called honyocks. In modern internet parlance, someone who could be relied upon to habitually derpty derpa derp da derpy doo would probably be considered a honyock.

Until I was about ~32 years old, I had never heard that word used by anyone other than my dad, and I fully believed he invented it. Well, lo and behold I started a new job one day, and after a while I overheard the boss playfully referring to some of the employees as “honyocks”! Long story shorter, I eventually told him a skeletal version of the above, and expressed my astonishment that there was another person who knew the Secret Word.

According to this guy, who was also from Missouri, “honyock” is a derogatory term for someone of Hungarian descent, along the lines of “polack”. I know full well that my dad was not carrying around a weird hatred of Hungarians, so this is clearly something he picked up from his ancestry, who were of nebulous Central European descent. I doubt that he ever had the slightest idea of the (apparently) bigoted connotation.