Honky is a corruption of hungy or hunky, a term which originated in the stockyards and slaughterhouses of Chicago. The term may derive from "Bohunk" (Bohemian-Hungarian), which was used to refer to central Europeans. Black and Hungarian workers were two of the largest ethnic groups in the Chicago meat industry. Racial and ethnic tension between the two groups led Black workers to begin calling Hungarian workers, and those perceived as Hungarians, hunky, perhaps in retaliation for the racist epithets to which blacks were subject. The corruption 'honky' emerged shortly thereafter.
3/17/2009 8:49:44 PM
LOL WUT
3/17/2009 8:50:29 PM
"Honky" is a racial epithet. It was made popular in the 1970s by a man named George Jefferson. You see, he and his wife owned a dry-cleaning business, so they moved on up to the east side, to a deluxe apartment in the sky. They finally got a piece of the pie.
3/17/2009 8:51:32 PM
The term "cracker" was in use during Elizabethan times to describe braggarts. The original root of this is the Middle English word crack meaning "entertaining conversation" (one may be said to "crack" a joke); this term and the alternate spelling "craic" are still in use in Ireland and Scotland. It is documented in Shakespeare's King John (1595): "What cracker is this same that deafs our ears with this abundance of superfluous breath?"By the 1760s, this term was in use by the English in the British North American colonies to refer to Scots-Irish settlers in the south. A letter to the Earl of Dartmouth reads: "I should explain to your Lordship what is meant by Crackers; a name they have got from being great boasters; they are a lawless set of rascalls on the frontiers of Virginia, Maryland, the Carolinas, and Georgia, who often change their places of abode". A similar usage was that of Charles Darwin in his introduction to The Origin of Species, to refer to "Virginia squatters" (illegal settlers).
3/17/2009 8:53:21 PM
We are the Time-Haters. We've traveled back in time...to call ya a cracker.
3/17/2009 8:59:08 PM