different between zonky vs honky

English

Etymology

zonk +? -y

Pronunciation

Adjective

zonky (comparative more zonky, superlative most zonky)

1. (slang) Very fatigued; zonked.
   • 2005, Susan K. Lorenz, Choose a Miracle (page 93)

     And I feel kind of zonky this morning. Maybe I needed the sleep.

   • 2011, P. J. Hoge, Z: Fourth in the Prairie Preacher Series (page 151)

     She was much better before the medicine made her all zonky.

2. (slang) Weird, odd, eccentric.
   • 1965, Kurt Vonnegut, “Infarcted! Tabescent!” The New York Times, 27 June, 1965,^[2]

     He knows all the stuff that Arthur Schlesinger Jr., knows, keeps picking up brand new, ultra-contemporary stuff that nobody else knows, and arrives at zonky conclusions couched in scholarly terms.

   • 1977, Pauline Kael, “Drip-Dry Comedy” in When the Lights Go Down, New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1980, p. 361,^[3]

     […] she doesn’t have the precision of a Jean Arthur, yet she has some of that rueful, fluffy-in-the-head charm of someone whose brains are addled by her sexual impulses, and she adds the blur in the expression and those tremulous, zonky eyes.

   • 1979, Bernard Malamud, Dubin’s Lives, New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, Chapter One, p. 22,^[4]

     “I tried the State Employment Office and all the guy there does is show you unemployment figures for the county and shakes his head. Makes you feel zonky.”

   • 2005, Michael Cunningham, Specimen Days, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, “Like Beauty,” p. 242,^[5]

     Gradually Simon’s powers of movement returned. He felt them coming back. It was a growing warmth, an inner blooming. He was able to say, “Guess I went a little zonky back there, huh?”

References

English

Alternative forms

• honkey, honkie

Etymology

Sense of “factory hand” attested from 1946. Compare hunky, bohunk.

Term of racial abuse attested 1967, most likely from hunky (“Hungarian, Slav, eastern European; any white person”), an African-American vernacular shortening of Hungarian. Another possible etymon is Wolof honq (“red, pink”), a term frequently used in African languages to describe white men.

Pronunciation

• Rhymes: -??ki

Noun

honky (plural honkies)

1. (Canada, US, derogatory, ethnic slur) A white (Caucasian) person.

   Synonyms: see Thesaurus:white person

2. (US, obsolete) A factory hand or general unskilled worker.

Translations

References