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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
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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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