Kyle in Fort Monroe, Virginia, says his family jokingly uses the term honyock to refer to “someone who acts in a silly way,” and often applies this word to politicians and bad drivers. Variously spelled, hunkyak, hunyakker, or hunyokker, the word originated with the wave of Hungarian immigrants to the United States in the late 1800s and early 1900s. This term for one of those immigrants is likely a combination of Hun, a term for “a German person,” and the suffix -ack as in Polack for “a Polish person.” It originally applied to rowdy, boisterous characters, but over time, underwent what linguists call semantic bleaching, as the term’s original negative sense faded. Variations of this term include bohunk, hunky and hunk. It also gave rise to the term honky, meaning “a white person.” The nicknames Hunky Town and Hunky Row were once applied to neighborhoods with a high concentration of immigrants from Eastern Europe. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Honyoks and Hunyokkers”
Hi there, you have A Way with Words.
Hi, this is Kyle calling from Fort Monroe, Virginia.
Hi, Kyle, what’s up?
So I’m calling about the word honyok, which is a term commonly used in our family, but
Whose actual origin or meaning has been a bit of a mystery to us and I’d love to know
More about.
The word is typically used, at least how it’s been used by our family, is kind of to refer
To somebody who might be an idiot or a dummy, somebody who kind of acts in a silly way. And
Not really in a way that’s like pejorative or mean, but kind of in a fun kind of way. And
I would say this was commonly used, at least by my grandpa, to refer to politicians or bad drivers,
Things like that. Okay. Yeah, that’s making a lot of sense. And so the whole family says it now. His
Children and his grandchildren also say, hun-yuck. Yeah, I would say I remember it mostly from him,
But we’ve all kind of used it as kind of a tongue-in-cheek way in daily life
To kind of avoid using maybe an obscenity where one might be warranted.
But yeah, we continue to use it.
I use it, my mom uses it, and we have no idea where it comes from.
So we love to make sure that we’re using it directly,
That there isn’t maybe some other interesting history.
It does have a history, and we can tell you a lot about it.
There are a couple of spellings and a couple of different ways to say it.
So H-U-N-Y-A-K, H-O-N-Y-O-C-K, and a few more.
And some people say Hunyaker or Hunyaker.
And what it is, is a word that originally referred to people from Hungary.
Unlike other waves of European immigrants that spoke Romance languages,
Their Hungarian sounded different to American ears.
So they kind of got their own term.
You know, people called them their own word.
And this word is maybe modeled on Hun, H-U-N, a term for Germans, particularly common during World War I, plus the Ack, the A-A-C-K, from Polak, meaning a Polish person.
This is the late 1800s, early 1900s.
This term starts to appear when this population of young men starts to appear.
And these young men working in the steel mills, working in the factories, and most of them took their hard-earned paychecks and sent them home so that they could bring their families to the new world.
But some of them took those paychecks and every Friday and Saturday, they blew them in the bars and they blew them on drinking and sometimes they get into fights.
And so when other people called them hunyaks, they were thinking about the troublemakers and not the good guys who were doing the right thing.
And so that’s why there’s that negativity around that term hunyak or hunyaker.
And it kind of had this connotation of somebody who was foolish or did unwise things or was unsophisticated.
And it became broadly used to mean any Eastern European immigrant, especially people from Poland, too, and later to any immigrants at all.
And over time, and this is where it’s going to connect to your family, there was something called semantic bleaching.
And semantic bleaching is when the negativity kind of fades out of a term.
And all that’s left is, in this case, something where it just means anyone who’s kind of a little bit silly or foolish or maybe just a little unsophisticated.
And that’s where we are with Yuri’s use of it, referring to bad drivers or foolish politicians, a honyak.
Wow.
Kyle, there are a couple more levels to this.
There are other forms of it.
For example, bohunk and hunky and hunky and hunk, H-U-N-K, not related at all to meaning, you know, a well-built man.
But also the word honky, H-O-N-K-E-Y.
And this is indeed the origin of the same derogatory term for any white person that we know today.
Honky comes from this word honyak.
No way.
Yeah.
Oh my goodness.
Yeah, and if you’re ever doing any research on the history of Midwestern cities in the U.S., you might find unusual references to Hunky Town or Hunky Row.
And although that seems really funny, it probably was an unofficial name for the part of a neighborhood or a street settled by foreigners or immigrants who worked in the mills and factories.
Wow, that’s incredible. I had no idea there was such a history.
It’s a lot of history, right?
That is something.
Wow, that’s really cool.
It’s got its roots in this wave of Eastern European immigration.
So much of what we say has a story,
And your family is carrying this story forward every time they use the word hanyak.
That’s incredible.
My grandfather, unfortunately, passed away early last year,
And we were afraid that because we never heard anyone else use it,
That the history was going to go now that he wasn’t around to explain it.
This is amazing.
Definitely not what I expected.
Yeah, and definitely not just your family.
It’s pretty widespread.
We hear this question fairly often.
That’s really cool.
Well, thank you so much.
Thank you so much for calling, Kyle, and sharing some history from your family.
Yeah, thank you.
All right, take care.
Thanks for calling.
Bye-bye.
Be well.
Bye.
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