{"id":12864,"date":"2016-09-12T17:11:52","date_gmt":"2016-09-12T16:11:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/blog\/?p=12864"},"modified":"2016-09-12T17:11:52","modified_gmt":"2016-09-12T16:11:52","slug":"joskins-bumpkins-and-yokels","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/?p=12864","title":{"rendered":"Joskins, bumpkins and yokels"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Last week a friend asked me about the origins of the word <strong>joskin<\/strong> [\u02c8d\u0292\u0252sk\u026an], which I hadn&#8217;t come across before. According to the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.urbandictionary.com\/define.php?term=Joskin\">Urban Dictionary<\/a> it is defined as follows: <\/p>\n<blockquote><p>North-Walian term used in both English and Welsh to describe anyone from a rural or farming background. It is used both affectionately and in a derogatory way depending on the audience.<\/p>\n<p>Example: He&#8217;s a right joskin &#8211; he&#8217;s got a tractor and everything.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>According to the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.collinsdictionary.com\/dictionary\/english\/joskin\">Collins English Dictionary<\/a> joskin is a slang word meaning &#8220;a country bumpkin; hick&#8221;.<\/p>\n<p>Wiktionary suggests that is comes from the dialect word <em>joss<\/em> (bump) and (bump)<em>kin<\/em>. Alternatively it comes from the name Joseph + (bump)kin [<a href=\"http:\/\/www.merriam-webster.com\/dictionary\/joskin\">source<\/a>].<\/p>\n<p><strong>Bumpkin<\/strong>, a clumsy, unsophisticated person or a yokel, apparently comes from the Dutch <em>boomken<\/em> \u200e(shrub, little tree) [<a href=\"https:\/\/en.wiktionary.org\/wiki\/bumpkin#English\">source<\/a>]. Or it might come from the Dutch <em>bommekijn<\/em> (small cask), from the Middle Dutch <em>bomme<\/em> (cask) [<a href=\"http:\/\/www.merriam-webster.com\/dictionary\/bumpkin\">source<\/a>], and was also used as a derogatory reference to short and dumpy Dutch people [<a href=\"http:\/\/www.etymonline.com\/index.php?term=bumpkin\">source<\/a>].<\/p>\n<p><strong>Yokel<\/strong> possibly comes from German dialect word <em>Jokel<\/em>, a diminutive of Jakob, or an English dialect word meaning  woodpecker [<a href=\"https:\/\/en.wiktionary.org\/wiki\/yokel\">source<\/a>].<\/p>\n<p>What other words are there for joskins?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Last week a friend asked me about the origins of the word joskin [\u02c8d\u0292\u0252sk\u026an], which I hadn&#8217;t come across before. According to the Urban Dictionary it is defined as follows: North-Walian term used in both English and Welsh to describe anyone from a rural or farming background. It is used both affectionately and in a [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[102,104,116,10,77,78],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12864","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-dutch","category-english","category-german","category-language","category-welsh","category-words-and-phrases"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12864","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=12864"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12864\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=12864"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=12864"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=12864"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}