dear cecil:
i read the origin of the term honky…http://www.straightdope.com/classics/a3_257b.html i had a friend from allentown, pa tell me that the term came from the white boys from allentown driving over to pottstown, pa to visit the cat houses in the black neighborhood. they would drive down the street stop, and blow their horns and the prostitutes would come out of their houses to me them. the term that the girls would use for them was “honkys”. this term then spread as a derogatory term for whites throughout the black communities of the us. any truth to this story? thanks bob
One of the sources in Cecil’s story was Tom Kochman, professor of communication, University of Illinois at Chicago. The other was Robert Hendrickson, author of the Encyclopedia of Word and Phrase Origins.
Your source is your friend from Allentown.
I doubt there’s much truth to your friend’s version. When did he think it originated? From the sounds of cecil’s article, it goes back to around the turn of the century, but he doesn’t really say.
We had cars then, but enough for people to develop a little horn-honking culture around a Pottstown cat house? Doubtful.
I’d have to side with the article. My father grew up here in Indianapolis in the 30s and “Hunkey” was a term I remember hearing him use to refer to Hungarian or Polish immigrants. I remember him refering to one of the local neighborhoods as “Hunkey Town”, which was a largly white working class neighborhood. I can see how this could have evolved into “Honkey” but both terms, once derogatory, have lost a lot of their venom and subsequently a lot of their original meaning.
Just to back up Cecil’s article: