- The cat horked up a hairball into the spaghetti *again*?
- Nothing like waking up in the middle of the night to a dog horking up undigested rawhide all over the carpet.
- That wild driving trip in the mountains made me hork up my Wheaties.
- Just horked up some cashew chicken, which I haven't had in ages, as a gift to myself. I wonder if this is why I can't seem to lose weight?
I was a little stunned; horking up--as in vomiting-- doesn't strike me as something that most people would do as a gift to themselves. Her second sentence, though, clued me in: She must have meant that she *ate* the chicken. Curiouser and curiouserNote1.
Hork does not appear in my Webster's, nor in my OED.
I went to my favorite online word-lookup site, Onelook.com, which searches through many online dictionaries. It provided me with a link to this page, which shows the following meanings:
- (slang) To foul up; to be broken.
- (slang, regional) To steal.
- (slang) To throw.
- (slang, offensive) To snort from the sinuses. (Similar to hocking.)
- (slang) To vomit.
- (slang) To gobble.
- (slang, transitive) To move; specifically in an egregious fashion
And that's the danger of slang: There is no "real" or "official" definition, and so it means whatever the user intends it to mean, which might change from person to person, neighborhood to neighborhood, state to state, or region to region.
So, I'm curious--do YOU use "hork," "horking," or "horking up"? What do YOU mean when you say it?
Note1 If you're not familiar with "curiouser and curiouser," see it in context here. But that's the beginning of chapter 2; start here to read the whole thing. Cultural literacy, you know, that's important, too.
10 comments:
"Here, this is yours. I am not a pen-horker!" (def 2)
That just sounds wrong to me! Obviously I have to have my dictionary brain in place when confronting horking.
That was a fun post! Had me laughing out loud.
I too always understood the first sense you described. As in,
"I sure hope the dogs won't later on hork up the rawhides that they are actually chewing on while I came across this post." (true story!) :P
Maybe those of us with multiple dogs just need that sense of horking up more often. :-)
Well after I horked out at the kennel for the mutt I bought some nice treats and horked all the free samples, the dog got into the bag and horked them all only to later hork all over the place.
That's sure a lot of horking!
My hubby has allergies that make him "hoark" most of the night, so that he has to spend part of the night in the recliner so he can simply breathe and hopefully sleep, too. We use it to refer to that horrendous, loud noise he makes when trying to clear his breathing tubes (both nose and throat) of the interfering goo.
My dad had similar problems. My sympathy to your hubby. At least he's not horking up hairballs!
Horking in English-speaking Montreal involved a noisy clearing of the lungs and spitting it out. Later, when a Masters student, I was reading an Anglo-Saxon/Latin glossary which translated "horch" as "mucus" - pretty consistent with the phlegm-clearing usage.
Thanks for the info, @nanuk.
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