When I was a lad, you might use a word that sounded like “hine-yock” for someone acting like a knucklehead. Is this a real word? How is it spelled?
If your speech community used it, it’s a “real” word. Whether anyone has documented it in writing, or how widespread its use is… that’s another question. Can you tell me where it was used, geographically, and if there’s any variation in pronunciation (hine-yog, hinn-yock)? I checked a couple of sources, but I think the place to go is (probably) the Dictionary of American Regional English.
ETA: If your origins are in the Upper Midwest, I’d guess http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/honyock.
Central Illinois farm boy. Is that Upper Midwest?
ETA: That’s almost certainly it. What with the huge Polish population in Chicago, is there a Polish equivalent to the Hungarian hanyag mentioned in your link?
It is a Hungarian word. If you remember the film “Chicago,” during the “Cell Block Tango” sequence where each female murderer sings about her crime which landed her in jail, there is a Hungarian ballerina called “The Hunyak.” Every thing she sings in Hungarian, though there are translations of it available online.
Some good stuff at Google with your spelling. Interesting comments here. I never took it to be patently offensive, but certainly disparaging - like if you called a person “knucklehead”, but in an exotic (to a Northern European mutt kid like me) language like Yiddish.
It surprises me that usage seems to have gone so far west (Montana, e.g.), and being used as a term for homesteaders, but I can attest that I never heard it in many years in Texas.
Urban Dictionary is wrong and/or stupid on so many things that I refuse to cite it as a source.
Urban Dictionary has its uses, but any decent public or university library should have this, which should have the information you want. It’s fairly common, though, for ethnic slurs to weaken over time as the population being slurred becomes accepted or assimilated.
And Polish is not related to Hungarian, so unless it borrowed the word from Hungarian in the same way as English did, it won’t have that word.
I have, mostly among older folk. My dad says “honyock” a lot.
My dad says it, too. I grew up in a small Texas town with mostly German and Czech people in it.
I wonder if it is related to a Yiddishism for a sort of nothing, everyman - Haim Yonkl. I’ve heard that name used to refer to, say, the guy who stocks the shelves at a market. As in, “I was walking down the aisle at the store and could barely get around the Haim Yonkl standing there.” Of course, this could have been a VERY local term, my family, my neighborhood, etc.
I’m from central Indiana, and so was Dad. When I was a kid (1950s), I occasionally heard Dad use the word dumb-yock, and it seemed to be a mild insult implying stupidity. He went to Europe for WW II, which exposed that generation of American men to other men of many local cultures.
I’m familiar with the term honyock, mostly from my grandparents, both of whom grew up in homesteading families in Eastern Montana, near Glacier National Park.
They used the term with pride and I always thought it meant tough and tenacious, rather than a slur.
In my great grandparents case, being a honyocker was probably a big step up since prior to that they were known as Loyalists. That branch of my family started out as Irish immigrants to America, sided with British during the revolution, given land and other considerations in Newfoundland after it wasn’t too popular to be a Tory in the United States anymore. My great grands took advantage of the Canadian Homestead act to prove up on land in Alberta and later jumped the border to take up homesteads in Montana.
Guess technically I’d be a honyocker myself since I was born on the original homestead entry.
I don’t recall if it was just an extended family thing, or if the nearby town sponsored it, but I recall attending the annual honyocker picnic in the tiny town of Dupuyer.