{"id":17364,"date":"2018-04-20T12:00:35","date_gmt":"2018-04-20T19:00:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/?p=17364"},"modified":"2018-04-20T12:00:35","modified_gmt":"2018-04-20T19:00:35","slug":"shonky","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/2018\/04\/20\/shonky\/","title":{"rendered":"shonky"},"content":{"rendered":"\r\n<p>The <cite>Grauniad<\/cite>'s Hadley Freeman refers to Michael Cohen, of the alleged wire-fraud and the checked jacket, as <a href=\"https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/fashion\/2018\/apr\/18\/michael-cohen-jacket-donald-trump-lawyer\">nothing more than a shonky used-car salesman<\/a> in a column today. I had come across the word <I>shonky<\/i> a few times and inferred its meaning\u2014unreliable, untrustworthy, shoddy. I hadn't thought about its derivation, though, and I thought that perhaps y'all might be interested, so: to the OED, W&amp;S friends!\r\n<p>And, well, they don't really know. Ah, well.\r\n<p>But\u2014and this is a big but\u2014it just might be related to the noun <i>shonk<\/i> or <i>shonniker<\/i>, which was an ethnic slur term for Jews. It might not be! It's hard to be sure. The slur was in use in England in the mid-20th century and may have transferred to Australia after, possibly (but probably not) losing its anti-Semitic specificity. A Google search seems to indicate that <i>shonk<\/i> and <i>spiv<\/i> are definitely connected in Australia, at least rhetorically. I don't know that anyone thinks of either of them as anti-Semitic, but then I have heard that Australians use the slang <i>motza<\/i> (or <i>motzer<\/i>) to mean a large sum of money without anyone thinking of it as anti-Semitic, either. You know?\r\n<p>Anyway, I am not actually offended. It seems unlikely that Hadley Freeman (who is Jewish and occasionally writes about anti-Semitism) used a term with anti-Semitic connotations to describe an attorney named Cohen. It is more likely that the term, whatever its derivation, does not actually have those anti-Semitic overtones. And yet, to be honest, having looked it up, I don't think I would be comfortable using it myself, either.\r\n<p>Thanks,<br>-Ed.\r\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Such a great sounding word, too. Shonky.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[26,23,83],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-17364","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-etymology","category-slang","category-specific-words"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17364","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17364"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17364\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17365,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17364\/revisions\/17365"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17364"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17364"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17364"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}