916: honky and hungarian Jun 12, 2017

Unfortunately, there are a lot of racial slurs used in English and pretty much every other language, though according the the anti-discrimination paradigm this won't change until people's views change, or until the particular word changes meaning. We see this with the word 'honky' and its predecessor 'Hunky' which referred to white people, specifically from Central or Eastern Europe. Now the word is much less common than it used to be, as opinions have shifted, but it still appears in word 'honky-tonk' which is at most a distant relation in terms of its current meaning. Similar to how the opinion of Slavs by Western Europeans was pretty bad as indicated by the name (learn more by clicking the link), 'Hunky' came from an alteration of the word 'Hungarian'. The word 'Hungarian' isn't even what the Hungarians call themselves either; the word for Hungary in Hungarian is 'Magyar'. Like many names for European countries in English, the reason for the difference between the native name for the area and the English ones is from Latin. Just like how the name for the Belgian Walloons came from the name for a single Gaulish tribe in the region whom the Romans encountered, 'Hungary' comes from the word 'hun' ruled by Attila in the 5th century.