Not everything is hunky-dory, and why should it be?

First of all, let me apologize for the egregious typo I made in the previous post in Ernest Weekley’s name. This is what comes of being too devoted to every line of Oscar Wilde and his comedy The Importance of Being Earnest. On the other hand, mistakes, not necessarily such shameful ones, may be a blessing in disguise. I sometimes receive no comments or questions for weeks. But God forbid if I write something wrong! It turns out that my readership is not only rather large but also wide awake. The terrible typo caught my eye the minute the post appeared, but it was too late to correct it in the email our subscribers received. My only hope for redemption is that a fault confessed is half-redressed, or a sin confessed is half-forgiven. According to a Russian saying, the sword doesn’t cut a repentant head (see the image!).

Allow me now to go on with my intended subject. I often say that I read newspapers with an etymologist’s eye. Every time I see words like zonk out or prissy, I look up their history, and the result is invariably the same: “Origin unknown.” I am gradually coming to the realization of the fact that most recent words belong to this group. Not long ago, I came across the noun hunks “miser” (of course, not in a newspaper!). Though I had been familiar with the word for years, I consulted a dictionary, to discover where it came from. The sources assured me that no one can tell. Nor can I provide the sought-for answer. Yet I have a vague idea, and sharing it may be of some use.

My road to hunk begins with the German verb hinken “to limp” (Old English had hincettan, the same meaning). The relation between hink– and hunk– is the same as between English sink and sunk (ablaut). In older German, hancen also existed. The northern German noun hanke “hind leg of a horse” belongs here too. Itmigrated to French and returned to English in the form haunch. All kinds of legs and bones will reemerge below. When you squat on your haunches, you hunker down. (By contrast, when you collude with your buddies, you bunker down. Some time ago, bunker down swept the pages of newspapers. Presidents and foreign ministers never met: they invariably bunkered down, and I always thought of them as hiding in some basement or bunker for secret negotiations. Bunker, I am sorry to report, is also a word of uncertain origin.)

Strangely, several English words ending in –unk refer to unpleasant things, lack secure cognates, and provide no or almost no clues to their origin. Such are junk, punk, funk, and spunk. Long ago, I touched on the history of punk (see the post for July 4, 2012: “Real ‘spunk’”). Even bunk “sleeping berth” and bunk “to make off,” which evoke no negative associations, are obscure. Talk bunkum goes back to a well-known situation. A member of Congress could not be made to stop speaking because, according to him, he was bound to make a speech for Buncombe. The story may be true, but the idiom would hardly have stayed if not for the way Bunkum sounds. It is usually hard to explain, let alone to prove, why a certain combination of sounds (English –unk, for example) evokes symbolic associations. Yet, when the origin of a word is unclear, a guess in this direction may be worth the trouble.

I am returning to hunk, which seems to have an obvious connection with German hinken and its likes elsewhere in Germanic, including Old English. The root hunk, I suspect, was coined to refer to unsteady movement (to repeat: hinken means “to limp”). In this blog, I sometimes refer to Hensleigh Wedgwood, the main etymologist of the pre-Skeat era. His constant references to sound imitation ruined many of his hypotheses, but he had the rare knack of ferreting out cognates and similar-sounding words in various languages that sometimes made even his shakiest solutions worthy of consideration. English and German are of course related! I would like to quote Wedgwood’s comment on hump. “The immediate origin seems the notion of a projection, a modification of form which may either be regarded as traced by ‘a jogging motion, or as giving a jolt to those who pass over it,’ for a jolting movement is represented by the figure of a rattling sound or broken utterance.” He added English hobble ~ hob, hub, and Low German humpeln “to limp” (again “to limp”!), and hunch to his examples. Hunk, the object of this essay, seems to be in some general way related to hump because, from a phonetic point of view, the consonant groups –mp and –nk are non-identical twins: –mp is articulated on the lips, while –nk is its guttural counterpart. A hunchback, it will be remembered, is someone with a hump.

Hunch, a doublet of hunk, did once mean “to thrust, shove.” According to the common opinion, hunch is a word of unknown origin, but both it and hunk are akin to hinch “to push” and thus, directly to German hinken. Hinch and hunch are related to each other and to hinken ~ hincettan. The Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology notes that hunch and hincettan do not agree in sense, but I have a hunch that Wedgwood was right and that some sort of unsteady movement underlies the idea of the entire small group.

We began our journey with hunks “miser.” This word is sometimes provisionally traced to the verb hang. Its affiliation with hinken and the rest seems much more obvious. A hunks might be a pushful individual. Once he amassed a fortune, he became a miser. Likewise, a curmudgeon was initially an ill-tempered man, and only later, usage turned him into a skinflint. The plural ending in hunks is typical. I discussed it at some length in the post for June 14, 2023 (the origin of buddy). This s, discernible in Boots, digs, and so forth, is always emphatic. However, an elaborate semantic reconstruction of hunks may not even be necessary. Here are a few lookalikes of hunks: Scottish hunk “a sluttish, indolent woman,” Low (= northern) German Hunke “a bone with all the meat gnawed off” (see the image in the header!), another German dialectal word Hunke–bunk “an emaciated man; a bad horse” (a jocular rhyming formation), and a few others (some of those examples were collected by Francis A. Wood, a distinguished etymologist of the age gone by). Not a love of money but low status is the central motif of this group.

Hunk seems to have emerged with reference to all kinds of inferior objects, and later, the name was transferred to despised individuals. English “miser” is only one of such senses. Of course, a hunks is more despicable than a hunk. (This is what is called grammatical stylistics.) The origin of words like hunk can probably be understood only while examining the entire family of similar etymological outcasts: a bird’s-eye view of the whole group will yield more promising results than a careful examination of each individual item. The words, mentioned above, were recorded in English late, even though some of their cognates are old. It of course remains unclear to what extent all of them are native and sound-imitative or sound-symbolic.

_{Featured image via PickPik. Public domain.}