Wednesday's Random Slang-o-rama: Hunky-dory

 

In my search for nautically themed slang, I thought I had a sure-fire winner with hunky-dory. After all, a dory is a small boat, right?

Ah, not so fast....

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... in this case, my assumption led me astray.

First, for the definition. Merriam-Webster Online goes simple, with "quite satisfactory," and pegs first use in 1866. As for the etymology, the dictionary offers this:

obsolete English dialect hunk home base + -dory (of unknown origin) 

Huh. Not hunky-dory enough for me, so off we go, a-searching for something more definitive. 

The Phrase Finder (TPF) notes hunky-dory is U.S. in origin, and pushes the date back a few years to 1862, when it first appears as hunkey-dorey. TPF adds:

We do know that 'hunky-dory' wasn't conjured from nowhere but was preceded by earlier words, that is, 'hunkey', meaning 'fit and healthy' and 'hunkum-bunkum', which had the same meaning as 'hunky-dory'. 'Hunkey' was in use in the USA by 1861, when it was used in the title of the Civil War song A Hunkey Boy Is Yankee Doodle. 'Hunkum-bunkum' is first recorded in the US sporting newspaper The Spirit of The Times, November 1842.    

For the dory part,  TPF points to the fourth edition of Dictionary of Americanisms by John Russell Bartlett (1877) and the following entry:

Hunkidori. Superlatively good. Said to be a word introduced by Japanese Tommy, and to be (or to be derived from) the name of a street, or a bazaar, in Yeddo. 

All well and good, but who the heck was Japanese Tommy? Well, if you read the TPF post all the way, you'll find that Japanese Tommy was an entertainer in the 1860s, but not Japanese at all.

I was about to despair of a nautical connection... but wait! At the conclusion of the TPF post there's this hypothesis:

...The Japanese term 'honcho-dori' means something like 'main street' and many cities there have one. US sailors would have known the word 'hunky' and could have added the Japanese word for road ('dori') as an allusion to the 'easy street' they found themselves in in Japan. There certainly were 'honcho-dori' streets of easy virtue in Tokyo and Yokohama that catered for the age-old requirements of sailors in port after a long voyage.

So, hunky-dory does have a possible nautical connection, just not the one I had envisioned. 

And I thought it was this kind of dory!
Winslow Homer - Gloucester Harbor and Dory (1880)
Wikimedia Commons, Public Domain