Honky, Hunky, and Hunyak

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

This is John Chigi.

Hi, John.

Where are you calling us from?

Fort Worth, Texas.

Actually, right outside Fort Worth, down in Cleburne, Texas.

Cleburne.

All right.

Well, welcome to the show, John.

What can we help you with?

I was looking for some kind of route where the word honky comes from. I looked on the Internet, and they say what is some kind of racial term, but it didn’t give me any idea exactly where that word came from and what it meant.

What brought this to your mind?

Why did you wonder about the word honky?

Well, I’ve always been interested in that. In fact, back in the 70s, I was in my 20s, I taught at an all-black high school for about seven years and encountered all kinds of words. And actually, I’d heard that word before. And we discussed it in class. We’d have those days where they would ask me questions about white culture, and I would ask them some clarifications on the black culture. There was no white children that ever went to the high school.

Well, let’s look on that one. So honky is a derogatory term for a white person usually used by African-Americans, right?

Yes.

Yeah, and it is still considered impolite and not a term that you would throw about and use without taking a risk of getting punched, probably. The origin is super, super interesting. It actually comes from a word that was used for immigrants from Eastern Europe. And so there’s a variety of forms of it, but honky, honky, honyak, honyaker. And all of these terms start to pop up in the early 1900s when there was a big influx of people coming, particularly in the northern cities where the factories were being created, where there were good industrial jobs. And the term for the Hungarians, which is how it started, any kind of Slavic person or anybody who was even vaguely from that part of Europe, it generically was used for them, even if they had nothing to do whatsoever with Hungary. And then even further generalized to refer to any white person. And honky is still used today. It’s nowhere near as widespread. It doesn’t have the sting that it used to have, but generally it’s avoided.

How did your students use it?

Well, we actually have a little more interesting and fun discussion about it because we didn’t know anything about all that. And we just kind of took it up as a common sense thing, what they might experience in their neighborhood. Right. And one explanation was when the white boys would go to pick up their dates, they would honk their horn and the date would come out and get in the car. They wouldn’t go up to the door and knock necessarily. Or when they’d be going down the street and they’d see a good-looking gal, they’d honk the horn, watch them be driving their car. That was one explanation. Then another might be that they experienced this in the neighborhoods when white employers would come through the neighborhood to pick up a maid or a worker or a butler or a musician and would honk the horn for them to come out and get in the car.

Yeah, none of those are the origin of the word. I mean, they’re fun stories, but they’re not true origins of this word. We know this because the word exists before automobiles were widely used in the United States.

Well, John, I want to thank you. I know you said you had some other questions. If you want to include those in an email to us, maybe we’ll get you on the show another time to talk more about this stuff.

All right?

All right.

Fantastic.

Thank you.

Take care now.

Thanks, John.

Bye-bye.

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