Honyocks

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Ethan from Reidsburg.

I have a question about the word hanyak.

It’s a word that I heard a lot when I was younger,

When my parents used to sometimes call my sister and me hanyaks.

And years later, when I was in college studying to be a teacher,

I was working with a middle school teacher who told a group of her students

That they were acting like a bunch of hanyaks.

And I couldn’t believe what I was hearing because here is someone using a word that I had always thought that my parents had just made up, and I hadn’t heard it since I was a kid.

And since then, I’ve asked numerous people whether or not they had ever heard the word before or if they knew what it was.

And I have never met another person who has ever even heard of the word.

And so it really made me wonder what the word meant, what its history was, and just how it could have possibly made itself into my family’s vocabulary.

What did you think it meant based on the context of how you heard it?

Well, usually my parents used it when my sister and I were being kind of silly or goofy, which is, I guess, how the students, when the teacher I was working with, how they were acting, too, I guess, at the time.

And do you have any idea how they would have spelled it?

Well, I don’t know exactly the spelling.

I guess I’ve spelled it just as it’s pronounced phonetically as H-O-N-Y-O-C-K.

Yep, that’s one example of this word.

There are lots of different variants of it,

But you will find this word in your part of the country and especially out west.

And it comes from an old word, hunyak, H-U-N-Y-A-K.

Which was kind of a pejorative

I mean for a while it was a very pejorative term

For immigrants to this country from Central or Eastern Europe

Especially people from Hungary or Poland

And over time it became a much more innocent sounding term

People would call little rascally kids

Hanyakers and that kind of thing

Yeah, it’s at least 100 years old in English

And it’s well attested across a wide variety of literature

There are a lot of forms, hunyak, hunyak, hunky, bohunk, hunyacker, a lot of different stuff here.

For a long time, and even kind of currently, it’s been used to mean a rube or a yokel,

Or even just like a layabout kind of person, just a lazy lout.

Right. Well, it was very interesting.

I’ve always wondered because it’s just a word.

Seriously, when I was a kid, I thought it was a word my parents had just made up.

Right, your own personal word.

Right.

Anyway, Ethan, you old Honyacher, thank you for calling.

Well, thank you very much for helping.

Now it all makes sense, and it explains just what a Honyach is now,

And it can put a location with it now.

Yeah.

Sure.

Well, excellent.

The light bulb’s on.

Right.

Thank you for calling.

Thank you for having me.

All right.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

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