Tag Archives: wonk

This is the sound of someone being knocked on the head with a stack of accumulated knowledge, knocked so hard that they are dizzied and off-kilter. It is also the sound of the person doing the knocking, who is probably pretending that the assault is really banging on the door to greater knowledge – most of all, though, they want (wonk?) you to know that they know. They know this stuff backwards.

Know, backwards: wonk.

No.

No, that is not where wonk comes from, or at least there is no evidence for it beyond the form coincidence (which in itself is never enough). But I wouldn’t be surprised if it has played a little role in the semantic evolution of the word.

So where does this word come from? I know you’re looking at me to find out, since I’m a word wonk. Well, I will wonk this word. I will wonk you with this word. I will wonk out on this word. Actually, the use of wonk as a verb is not well established (the only definition I’ve seen that includes it as a verb form is in Urban Dictionary), so why don’t I do all three.

Wonk has been around for a few decades, but it really hit its stride in the 1990s, when Bill Clinton came into office with a staff of smart nerdy guys, who came to be called policy wonks – still by a long chalk the most common collocation for wonk.

Before that, starting by 1962 (when it appeared in Sports Illustrated), wonk was a term for an overly studious person. Sort of like a nerd or a geek (I’ll leave the shades of meaning between those two for another time). About as awkward sounding as dork. Somehow the exact opposite of punk. Who’da thunk it? Ha. The wonk woulda. He woulda dropped his books on the table, “thunk,” and there you’d have it. (I say he because wonks have long been stereotypically male. A counterexample to that – but the suffix proves the default – is the snarky smart policy-and-politics blogger who goes by Wonkette.)

So where did that wonk come from? The data is (are) inconclusive. Could be from British naval slang for ‘midshipman’. But yyyeeaaahhhh probablynot. Could be from wonky meaning ‘unstable, off-kilter, unreliable’, but how it got from that to a swot is unclear. Or it could be from wanker. Which strikes me as semantically most plausible, what with wanker meaning ‘onanist’ (if you do not know either of those words, well, um, Google). But phonetically it’s a bit off because the vowel shift is unaccounted for. It could be ablaut: wank, wonk, wunk – I wank today, I wonk yesterday, I have wunk. But there is no wunk. Well, except for this Urban Dictionary definition, which was probably made up by the submitter and is clearly derived from wink.

Urban Dictionary is actually not a bad source for wonk, as it happens. Some wonk posted a summary of the Oxford English Dictionary data for a definition; true to Urban Dictionary form, it’s been voted into fourth place, right behind the definition “The sound a goose makes when hit over the head with a shovel.” Wonks are still ostracized. Better to give a nice clear definition without too much tl;dr, like the top-voted definition:

(1) Noun – An expert in a field, typically someone who is fairly young and very intelligent.

(2) Verb – To use ones mastery of a specific subject to perform some type of work.

Oh – there is one more meaning of wonk, even older than the others. No one seems to think it’s related. It means ‘dog’ or, more specifically, ‘yellow dog’, in particular ‘Chinese yellow dog’, and was often used in the term wonk dog. It appears to come from Mandarin huang gou (which sounds rather like “whonk-o”) and was used only in contexts related to China. The OED quotations for it point up its assonance with a racist term for Chinese people that also ended in nk. No one seems to use wonk dog now. It has become unknown. Which is the opposite of wonked.

You’re a wonk about a subject if you know the subject backwards.

Get it? Know backwards is wonk.

So is that where wonk comes from? Some people think so. Others – including some of the most noteworthy word wonks – declare that they don’t know. There are other words wonk, including a naval term for a greenhorn sailor, Australian slang for a white person or an effeminate man, and a mutated borrowing from Chinese meaning ‘yellow dog’ (and often seen in the phrase wonk dog). There is also the word wonky, which means ‘off-kilter, unstable, unreliable’, and there is some suggestion that wanker may have been an influence too (wanker, for those who don’t know, is a British term that literally calls the person an onanist and thus more broadly and figuratively functions similarly to its American counterpart jerk).

The word wonk was formerly more pejorative than it generally is now; just as nerd was once an insult but now is elevated to near-approbation, and geek has gone all the way from a term of disgust and abuse to high praise, wonk has moved from a word for a boring, excessively focused, swottish (that’s a Britishism) person, towards one for an interesting, respectworthy, highly focused, swottish person.

And there is now one area above all in which one may be a wonk. Yes, you could be a math wonk or a word wonk (or language wonk or whatever), but in the general usage wonk has a steady wordfriend: policy. Political staff who know all about the little details of how things are done and can be done and should be done are policy wonks. This seems to have become a popular term under President Clinton, who showed a predilection for hiring highly intelligent, highly focused, swottish people. You get an image of an introverted person with an abstractly intense look – and glasses, probably – dispensing precise thoughts and ramified recommendations to a blow-dried (but perhaps thoughtful) candidate. Nerdy, maybe a little, but no less attractive than the sharp tools on Criminal Minds, if without all the blood.

There’s no question about it, this word has an awkward sound. With its labiovelar start, its nasal open vowel, and its knock at the back, it sounds like something large and hollow being struck, or a goose venting at you. But if you look at the different elements that might make it so – /wɑ/, /ɑŋ/ or /ɑ̃/, /ɑ̃k/, /ŋk/ – they all show up in non-awkward words as well: water, song, think… Ugliness of sound is no preventative for prettiness of sense. Once you get to be a word wonk, possibilities open up all around you.