English, I thought I knew you.
A red-light district in Yokohama, or a Dutch game of tag? Take your pick, as hunky-dory is a linguistic puzzle. Either the idiom emerges from the brothels of Honcho-Dori, or the slang hinges on honk, the Dutch word for home, where safety lies for Friesian kids playing chasings.
Even commonplace words can catch you unawares. Gas, for one, relates to chaos, alluding to its restless nature. Caucus owes its existence to the Algonquin tongue, where “caucauasu” means adviser. Of course, this root implies the term’s history, its debut tied to a Boston confab of powerbrokers in 1750.
When it comes to semantic spadework, Dent knows her onions. So why onions? Rhyming slang, after onion rings for things. Joining the ranks of bottle for nerve, rabbit for talk, or blowing a raspberry . Then there’s the Bag of Nails , which isn’t an inbuilt rhyme, but a pun on bacchanal.
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