Canoodle: odds and ends

[Dave Hause]

As sort of a midwesterner (Illinois & Missouri, but I've been in the Army
for a long time, which may be a vocational dialect), I would rhyme donkey
with honky but not monkey;  monkey I rhyme with Hunky (semi-derogatory for
the Hungarians I married into.)  Small "h" hunky, as attractive, I have
heard only as a feminine expression about men.
Dave Hause
----- Original Message -----
From: "James A. Landau" <JJJRLandau at AOL.COM>

In a message dated 11/15/02 10:11:26 AM Eastern Standard Time,
laurence.horn at YALE.EDU writes:

> >This is interesting, I have *never* heard donkey rhyme with monkey!
>
>  Meanwhile, back on the East Coast, I rhyme them with impunity.  But
>  "honky" rhymes with neither, so it's a matter of lexical diffusion
>  rather than purely a phonological matter.  (The adjective "wonky"
>  rhymes with "honky", but then unlike the others it has an internal
>  morpheme boundary.)

I rhyme "donkey" with "monkey", i.e.  /'duhn kee/,  but I find /'dawnk ee/
or
/'dahnk ee/ acceptable.  (And yes I do hear the /k/ move across the syllable
boundary, though I do not have the knowledge of phonetics to say why this
happens).

However, in my experience "honky" meaning "whte, usually disparaging" also
rhymes with "monkey".  Yes, the two politically incorrect words rhyme.  I
can't recall ever haing heard /'hawnk ee/ or /'hahnk ee/ in this sense.
Yes,
 /'hawnk ee 'tawnk/, but here this is probably to make the first and last
syllables rhyme.