Assorted comments

[Douglas G. Wilson]

>.... the phrase would then read "muddled doofs"
>which could be a shortening of "muddled doofuses".

"Doofus" is too recent, I think. Its possible ancestor "doof"" is easily
old enough, in Scots (says HDAS). Neither of these appears frequent in the
US English of 1902 (I can't find them, at a glance).

>"honq" and "xonxa" look to be the same word, as trascribed by two observers
>with different transliteration conventions ....

I believe these are the same word. I doubt there is a separate "pink" but I
haven't researched the matter fully and don't intend to. Wolof lexicon and
grammar are AFAIK utterly unrelated to the etymology of the English "hip"
or "honky", although I would change my position immediately if any grain of
evidence were put forth. "Xonxa" is one dictionary's spelling; I think it's
standard. "Honq" is of unknown provenance, possibly a casual transcription,
I don't know or care. But note that the forms adduced for the etymological
assertions are ones which are orthographically closer to the target word
(in order better to convince the fastidious savants of Wikipedia, NYT,
etc., maybe).

BTW: "Peking" vs. "Beijing": the "pe"/"bei" distinction seems to be merely
a choice of transcriptions of the same sound but the "king" vs. "jing"
seems to reflect a recent (during last few centuries) 'fronting'/
palatalization (pronunciation shift) in northern (particularly Beijing)
Chinese; I suppose the shift is probably still in progress. The "k" is the
older version, presumably adopted from a dialect which had not undergone
this shift at the time of the spelling choice (some dialects still don't
have the shift) ... or possibly from a conservative 'formal' pronunciation
(e.g., Chinese opera pronunciation retains some old features like this
still, AFAIK).

-- Doug Wilson