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of unknown origin
Tsuwm?...you have anything on this one?
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Get in line, Juan -first, he's got to find out whence huckery (as used here) comes.
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here's what M-W had to say about yegg when it was their daily word* : http://www.m-w.com/cgi-bin/mwwodarch.pl?Jul.17. OED2 offers "Said to be the surname of a certain American burglar and safe-breaker."huckery? as used where?** * do you think that possibly there are just too many daily words? **huckery is probably just from hucker, a back-formation from huckster.
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From wordorigins.com
Benjamin Choate
Unregistered User
(5/30/02 3:50 am)
Yegg
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
There were once the forms "John Yegg" and "yeggman". The words were associated with tramps (perhaps among other associations) ca. 1900. Claims about the origin include:
(1) from the name of a famous safecracker/criminal, John Yegg;
(2) from the German "Jaeger" = "hunter".
I do not know that either of these has any substantiating evidence.
The Pinkerton Web site gives another derivation (supposedly pre-1900):
**The word 'Yegg' or 'Yeggman' originated with the gypsies. When a particularly clever thief is found among a gypsy tribe, he is selected as the 'Yegg' or chief thief.**
I don't know that this is reliable at all. But note that many Romany dialects have something like "yek" meaning "[number] one" ... as do other Indic languages.
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>huckery? as used where? huckery is probably just from hucker, a back-formation from huckster Citation, s'il du please? As I mentioned in my email, huckery as used in NZ appears to be pretty much uniquely Zild, and there is no online mention of its origins anywhere, anbd that includes here the last time I asked. Also "huckster" is not used here, at laeast not now, nor since I was a child, but huckery is still in common use. Finally, the transformation from "con-man" to "old, decerpit, broken-down" seems a bit (although only a bit) of a stretch. Stretch or not, I will be happy to accept that it is so when I see proof from someone less fecal, if that's OK with you. 
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1377 She hath holden hokkerye al hire lyf time
The business of a huckster.
From B&M OED
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>1377 She hath holden hokkerye al hire lyf time
The business of a huckster.
Ok, Geoff, care to translate for me? Is the word there being used in the sense that is used up here, as an adjective, or is it being used as a noun? I am genuinely interested in figuring this one out, and definitely the help of those further up the evolutionary ladder to do so. Please.
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The business of a huckster
Sounds like a noun to me.
used up here
I'll echo ron, as used where?
If huckery is a modern backformation from huckster it has merely revived the 1377 usage. AHD4 claims that the origin of huckster is Middle English with Low German origin and references the Middle Dutch hokester. My German dictionary has Höker, but no corresponding Hökerei.
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well, I'm not Geoff, but few amongst us are; here is the compleat OED entry, fwiw:
Obs.
[f. HUCKER n. or HUCK v.: see -ERY. Cf. also HUCKSTERY.]
The business of a huckster.
1377 LANGL. P. Pl. B. v. 227 She hath holden hokkerye [v. rr. hukkerye, hukrie; C. hockerye, also huckerstrye; A. hoxterye] al hire lyf tyme.
so, she has held the business of a huckster all her lifetime. the citation is evidently from "LANGLAND, William
The vision of William concerning Piers Plowman."
an additional aside: Mencken gives huckster as an American equivalent to the English coster, costermonger or hawker. maybe the latter bears some relationship to the obviously rare hucker ([f. HUCK v. + -ER, or back-formation from HUCKSTER, q.v. (Perh. only a glossarist's word.)] A petty dealer; one who bargains or haggles.
edit: I continued to be puzzlepated by "as used up here" until I realized that was just max being parochial again. I kept looking for previous usage examples from NZ here, which all seem to have been deleted.
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My German dictionary has Höker, but no corresponding Hökerei.sounds pretty hokey to me...
formerly known as etaoin...
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Sorry, Faldage. Here in Zild, huckery means old, decrepit, run-down, threadbare, etc. Googling the owrd strongly suggests the usage is confined to Zild, and the word huckster is not used here. So, my question remains, where did we get our meaning of the word, and why does even the OED not have a reference for this usage?
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confined to Zild
Musta come from all y'alls rendering of Huckery Duckery Dock :)
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huckery == scungy
ah, that explains it. :)
p.s. - I also saw reference to a book titled "The Huckery Mole". perhaps that explains it (or not, it's prolly a proper name).
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huckery == scungy
ah, that explains it. :)
name).
Explains it how, dammit?! Next thing I know you'll be telling me elephants got hooves!
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Is that Geoff as in Chaucer?
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>Is that Geoff as in Chaucer?
Howdy, Pilgrim, and thanks for getting it.
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No small part of your charm is your subtlety, Max.
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from the Juxtaposition (out of context) for Fun & Profit Dept.
max> Explains it how, dammit?!
ASp> No small part of your charm is your subtlety, Max.
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>from the Juxtaposition (out of context) for Fun & Profit Dept.
I can never hear juxtapose without thinking of Emo Phillips:
---------------------------------
I had an argument with my father. I argued that Plato was the father of philosophy. My dad takes the opposite position, that I should wax the kitchen floor.
I said: "Well, the kitchen floor doesn't exist, at least not in the permanent sense the concept "floor" does."
He said: "Do you think the concept "your skull" exists?"
I said: "Yes" And then he surprised me by juxtaposing the two concepts.
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now *that* was subtle.
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I argued that Plato was the father of philosophy. My dad takes the opposite position, that I should wax the kitchen floor. ... And then he surprised me by juxtaposing the two concepts
That's what you get for waxing philosophic when there's work to be done.
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From the Just Supposin' for Juxtaposin' Dept:
In communism, man exploits man.
In capitalism it's just the opposite.
--old Soviet prole saying
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This is from the autobiography of Jack Black titled, You Can't Win.
"It is a corruption of "yekk," a word from one of the many dialects spoken in Chinatown, and it means beggar. When a hypo or beggar approached a Chinaman to ask for something to eat, he was greeted with the exclamation, "yekk man, yekk man"" ."
You Can't Win is a great story!
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newbie
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Maybe- with the lazy NZ pronunciation it stemmed from Mark Twain's Huckleberry- ya know huck...ery- slurring the words when we are not quite sure or even when we are. Derived from Twain's novel- and of course I have no basis whatsoever for this theory.
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Yah. Jack Black, noted historical linguist. Try this
Last edited by Faldage; 05/29/13 10:32 AM.
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Right. I read the online etymology link you posted. Jack Black was a yegg and writer from 1900 who, in his autobiography writes how he thinks the term originated. The link you posted states unknown origin, and 1903 which is the time period of Jack Black's personal writings. I thought it would be helpful to have a documented account from a yegg's autobiography on the origins of the word.
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