My husband and I are fixing to carry our bohunkuses down by
Baton Rouge to celebrate my father’s 80th birthday. Readers familiar with dialect of South
Louisiana understand what that statement says.
Others may get the gist generally.
Translated into Standard English I have stated that my husband and I are
getting ready to take our butts down to Baton Rouge to celebrate my father’s 80th
birthday.
While “fixing to” is a quirky phrase in Southern dialect,
bohunkus is the focus of this blog. “Bohunkus”
does not appear at all in my new American Heritage Dictionary, 5th
ed. Nor does it appear in my Chambers Slang Dictionary. It does appear, however, in my Random House Historical Dictionary of
American Slang.
Growing up, we used bohunkus as a fun way to say “butt.” It was never in my experience an
inappropriate usage. “Bohunkus” is a combination
of “bohunk,” referring to a contemptuous usage of the word “bohemian” or person
from Central or Eastern Europe, and “hunk” or “haunches.” The RHHDAS
cites usages in literature by Eudora Welty in 1941 and Lewis Grizzard in 1980 and
a usage in popular culture on the situation comedy, “Golden Girls” in 1989.
Even as a word of Southern slang, “bohunkus” seems to have
fallen from popular (or unpopular) usage.
However unwieldy, it is a fun word which I am doing my part to keep
alive. Now I am going to take my
bohunkus outside and enjoy this beautiful spring weather!
A variant form of this word, "bohunky," echoed in our house, but we pronounced it "bahonky". (The use of both the more formal-sounding "bohunkus" and its more colloquial cousin "bahonky" are indeed a southern thing, although I wonder which part of the south they originated in, since there aren't too many "bohunks" who settled in Louisiana.)
ReplyDeleteI remember my grandmother using another word entirely for this part of the anatomy, which I don't even know how to spell, and which I assume must have its origin in some French expression. I'll spell it like I heard it (many, many times when I was a kid): "bahss-dee-muss" (accent on second syllable). The context I remember it being used in involved admonitions about fractious behavior followed immediately by threats concerning the body part which would pay the price for it. In my fanciful etymological universe, I have concocted the expression "bas de mousse" (literally "bottom of moss" or in a less literal sense, "butt cushion"). I don't remember if there were other contexts in which she used this expression, but that's probably because they were overwhelmingly pre-empted by our rambunctious behavior. That's too bad, because as with "bohunkus," I think there's a lot of potential in the phrase "to take one's 'bahss-dee-muss' somewhere" or (even better) "to get up off of one's 'bahss-dee-muss'". I'm sure grandma would approve.