Is Honky the same origin in both uses?
Honky-Tonk a rowdy country bar that features music & dance
Honky - white guy - mild racial characterization
For what it’s worth, Wikipedia says “honky tonk,” referring to a rowdy bar, predates “honky,” as a pejorative for white people, by decades. The origins of both usages appear shrouded in mystery.
From etymonline, your source for all your word origin needs:
So probably not.
Probably not, although neither term has a definitive etymology.
“Honky” as “white person” is probably from “hunky”, a shortened form of “Hungarian”, referring to any Eastern European person especially one working as a laborer.
The etymology of “honky-tonk” is unknown. It has also been written “honkatonk”. There is a Suffolk dialectical word “honky-donks” meaning “hobnailed shoes” but The Historical Dictionary of American Slang says this is probably a coincidence.
To add to Hey Homie’s observation, the Historical Dictionary of American Slang has the first citation of “honky-tonk” in 1894 (as “honk-a-tonk”) and the first citation of “honky” is in 1946.
Here is another obscure reference.
I had looked at Wikipedia before posting and the entry was a bit confusing. Thought maybe there were better references.
I’ll read the links offered here.
Thank you for your help.
The variant of this that I have heard (though I can’t lay hands on a cite right now) is that it derives from “bohunk” - for which Partridge gives:
As an aside, is bohunk current in the US?
j
The Historical Dictionary of American Slang says “bohunk” is probably from “Bohemian hunky” and its first citation is from 1903.
“Bohunk” isn’t very familiar to me as a US English speaker but I can’t say I’ve never heard it before. THDAS gives a citation from the 1984 film Sixteen Candles. Google ngrams shows its use peaked around 1921 but has not completely died out.
It’s … I would call it dated, but I grew up with that word in the 80s, and I understood it to be a contraction of Bohemian+Hungarian. (We didn’t really have that many Hungarians here, but the Bohemians would sometimes be referred to as “Bohunks.”)
Ringo uses it in (It’s All Down To) Goodnight Vienna, which was written by John (1974):
Felt like a bohunk but I kept up my cool
Green as a frog, man I was back into school
Zipped up my mouth coz I was starting to droll
It’s all da da down to Goodnight Vienna!
Probably in certain parts of the country. I’m in the Cleveland area and used to work with a guy nicknamed “Tommy the Bohunk” in the late 90s. I’ve heard people use it since, because Cleveland is rife with Bohemians (Czechs). It’s probably a lot less known in, say, Montana.
I haven’t thought of/heard “bohunk” in ages. Is it like “honky,” which, like so many of these words, is “mild” or “very not mild” depending on when and who is using it?
I used to live in a Czech neighborhood, and heard it said by a (presumably) Czech American about himself.
But is it more often just descriptor rather than epithet, and used non-offensively by everyone? Ie, not even approaching the defined social interactions when the word “honky” or “nigger” is used.
“Bohunk” is, to me, about equivalent to “polack.” Who says it and how they say it matters, though I don’t hear “bohunk” anywhere near as much as I hear “polack,” but they’re both dropping in usage as immigration waves have passed by.