Honky

Opprobrious terms for groups tend to reflect, in their vehemence and their number, the social status of the group. As a number of sociolinguists have pointed out, in the United States and in the English-speaking communities in general, opprobrious terms for blacks greatly outnumber those for whites. Of the terms for whites, honky , which is exclusive to the United States, has become in a comparatively short time the term expressing the strongest contempt.

The term derives from Hunky , and is related Hun , diminutive and contemptuous forms of Hungarian , both words being originally applied to a person of Eastern European ancestry, especially a Hungarian or Slav, and often a manual laborer. Honky is thus typical of terms stigmatizing outsiders, especially workers of low status regarded as interlopers. Generalization is evident in two ways. The first is in the misnomer: the Hungarians are not Slavs but occupy an adjacent area of Europe; the Huns historically were a nomadic Asian race, before Kaiser William II co-opted them propagandistically as Germans. The second is that the term has expanded emotively in meaning, as have gook and wog .

The Reports of the Immigration Commission (1907–1910) noted under Magyar: “‘Huns’ and ‘Hunkies’ are names given … incorrectly to this race and to Slavs indiscriminately in some parts of America” (I, 255). An earlier report in the New York Daily News (June 8, 1890) stressed the hostility deriving from labor rivalry: “The Huns who are here [Pennsylvania] are said to be creating a widespread dissatisfaction. They are engaged chiefly as laborers in the mines and ironworks.” In the buildup to World War I, there was confusion with Hun meaning a German, recorded in this quotation from Slavic Citizen (1910): “To be a German is nothing to be ashamed of … ‘I ain’t no Hun, I’m an American,’ expresses their reaction to the situation” (414).

Although Hunky has continued as a nickname for an East European, references to whites in general date from the early 1950s. A phonetic overlap with honky , which has become the dominant term, is apparent in certain records. A revealing report in Time magazine (August 4, 1967) explained the term as part of the vocabulary of radical black politics: “Damning Lyndon Johnson for sending ‘honky’ cracker federal troops into Negro communities to kill black people’ Brown called the president ‘a wild mad dog, an outlaw from Texas.’ Honky, or honkie, is a black-power word for any white man, derived from ‘Hunkie’-Hungarian.”

Honky has an unusual semantic history in that it is confined to the United States and has greatly broadened in reference, being used successively of Hungarians, Slavs, Germans, and whites in general, but has simultaneously retained its animosity. Other terms that have generalized in application, like wop, gook , and wog , have lost some of their animus in the process.