Excuse me? Did You Say Hokey?

A reader asked me about a word I used in my introductory post.  “Did you mean to call yourself hokey?” Yep.  I said I’m hokey. If you have never heard that word, well…here’s your word for today.

I grew up with a bunch of boys. I was the only girl in the neighborhood and I stood my ground most of the time.  Tomboy, and all that. I could even fire off slang words with the best of them. Nothing dirty, mind you.  I was a good girl.  Just a little rambunctious.

The boys used to try to get me to say things I shouldn’t.  I was pretty good at determining what was a cuss word and what wasn’t.  But sometimes…..

Take the word “hokey.” When I first heard it, I thought they were saying “hooky.” You know, like skipping school. I was shocked because they were saying it about me! I would NEVER skip school.  I was a good girl! I was only about six or seven, but I knew skipping school was a very bad thing.

Then I found out what it really meant. “overly sentimental, obviously contrived, corny, melodramatic, cloying, goofy, mushy.”    …Well!

They probably meant I was corny.  I suppose I had said something beyond my years (I was prone to doing that, being the precocious little thing I was) and they didn’t understand it. So they resorted to the time-honored stance of older boys everywhere, and used a word they thought would be a devastating insult. We weren’t very intelligent at that age, but we made up for it with things that “sounded” grownup.

I used this delightful word in my very first post on this blog. (And I said it would turn up eventually.) Read it and you’ll see I used it correctly 🙂 So yeah, I can be hokey. It serves a certain purpose. I’m not a comedian by any means, but hopefully my attempts at humor don’t turn you away.