honcho > honchas

[Wilson Gray]

It's annoying that Amer. Speech chooses to ignore the great work of
other branches of service, such as the Army, in spreading this term
around the world, wherever American troops are stationed.:-)

And then there's the unfortunate, totally redundant "_head_ honcho,"
undoutedly the creation of some civilian, since veterans of the
military know that the honcho ^is* the head.

Japanese doesn't have grammatical gender, so that's nothing to worry
about. It's a problem for languages like Russian that do have
grammatical gender. Back in the day, Russian had no way to say "female
doctor." The only word available, _doktorsha_, means "doctor's wife."
So, they took the same way out as English: they simply did away with
feminine forms and used the masculine form for both men and women, as
is the case with, e.g. the dropping of "actress" from the American
lexicon. It's too bad that they didn't go with "actress" and drop
"actor." That would have been interesting.

Wilson
<wilsongray at ucdavis-alumni.com>


On 1/30/07, Michael T. Wescoat <mtwescoat at ucdavis.edu> wrote:
> ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       "Michael T. Wescoat" <mtwescoat at UCDAVIS.EDU>
> Subject:      honcho > honchas
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> There is a cute example of a coinage based on a folk etymology in the
> Doonesbury strip for 30 Jan. 07.
>
> [Two female engineering students are sitting in front of a robot
> which they cannot get to work as intended] We're engineering
> *honchas*, and the thing just sits there mocking us!
>
> The word _honchas_ appears to be a derivative of _honcho_, based on
> the assumption that the word is a borrowing from Spanish; the a -> o
> substitution would then be in accord with the regular pattern in
> Spanish gender marking.  The only trouble is _honcho_ comes from
> Japanese. The OED provides this citation from an unimpeachable
> source: "1955 Amer. Speech XXX. 118 Honcho. 1. n. A man in charge.
> (This is a Japanese word translated roughly as 'Chief officer',
> brought back from Japan by fliers stationed there during the
> occupation and during the Korean fighting...)."
>
> FWIW, the 'man' part of the above definition is probably not an
> inherent part of the meaning of the Japanese expression.  The word is
> a compound of _han_ 'squad' (anglicized in the spelling to <hon>) and
> _cho:_ 'leader' (Kenkyusha's New Japanese English Dictionary). It is
> my belief (corrections welcome) that compounds with _cho:_ apply to
> men or women.  (Good news: no need to mark gender.)
>
> FWIW, being disconnected from its 'squad leader' source may have
> helped along semantic drift, so that _honcho_ now appears to have
> 'hot shot' as one of its senses.
>
> Michael T. Wescoat
>
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>


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All say, "How hard it is that we have to die"---a strange complaint to
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