I recently attended a policy conference full of some delightfully detail-oriented nerds who invest their time in such issues as the way to speed the regulatory process for future generations of cheaper and smaller nuclear reactors, since the current dysfunctional regulatory framework is built only to accommodate large, light-water reactors. Most people, no doubt, would have been driven to give out some swirlies.
I heard the word “wonk” a lot and thought it even more. So, where does it come from? A New York Times Magazine issue of July 1980 suggests the origin of the word “wonk,” as a term to deride people who (flop)sweat the details of government affairs, may come from simply reversing the letters of the word “know,” just as George Lucas reversed the phonetic syllables of his earlier creation, the burly Wookies, when he made the cuddly Ewoks. Per the Oxford English Dictionary, “At Harvard the excessively studious student is derided as a ‘wonk,’” according to one Amy Berman, class of 1979.
That’s not its earliest usage, though, so the explanation, while fun, is likely wrong. In 1970, the word “wonk” appears in the tear-jerking movie Love Story, also set at Harvard. Apparently at Harvard, going at least back that far, students were divided into preppies, jocks, and wonks. It seems to have made its way into the common “policy wonk” by virtue of how many people who “went to school outside of Boston” make their way into the halls of government. From here, it became commonly known enough to be used to brand the “Wonkblog” of the Washington Post, the sort of owning of a derisive term we find a lot throughout history. (Think of how recently “queer” was a slur or how the British Conservative Party happily adopts what was initially an insult as its common name: the Tories.)
But “wonk” predates even the 1970s. In 1962, a Sports Illustrated correspondent explained how a wonk was also “sometimes called a ‘turkey’ or a ‘lunch,'” which roughly corresponded to the “meatball of a decade ago.” Isn’t it neat how times change? I think it’s a gas. Another explanation for where “wonk” originates will be harder to get past the editors here at America’s finest conservative weekly, which is, of course, a family magazine that would never indulge in anything obscene or gratuitous. According to the website World Wide Words, a useful and usually dependable resource, there is some unsure indication that “wonk” originated as an adulteration of the British word with an A. You know? Like onanism. Just look up Genesis 38:7-10.
It’s amazing how many recent words don’t have certain origins, including highly common ones linguists have dedicated huge energies to researching. The word “OK” probably comes from a joke inside a Boston newsroom where one editor spelled “all correct” as “oll korrect” to mock another one in 1839. But nobody’s quite sure. For decades, it was wrongly thought it came from a nickname for Martin van Buren from his campaign, Old Kinderhook. Maybe we’re wrong now. “OMG,” meanwhile, we also can’t find the very first usage of, but the first one we know of came from a naval officer in a letter to a fellow seaman by the name of Winston Churchill. “I hear that a new order of Knighthood is on the tapis — OMG (Oh! My god!) — Shower it on the admiralty!!”
The more of a wonk you get about the origins of words, the more you find the ones we can trace are the minority. For the rest, it’s usually wonky.
