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.
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