{"id":6853,"date":"2012-04-10T15:59:36","date_gmt":"2012-04-10T15:59:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/blog\/?p=6853"},"modified":"2012-04-10T15:59:36","modified_gmt":"2012-04-10T15:59:36","slug":"honchos","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/?p=6853","title":{"rendered":"Honchos"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I thought that the word <em>honcho<\/em> as in head honcho (big leader \/ big cheese) came from Japanese. The <a href=\"http:\/\/www.oed.com\/view\/Entry\/88139?redirectedFrom=honcho#eid\">OED<\/a> and the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.etymonline.com\/index.php?term=honcho\">Online Etymology Dictionary<\/a> both say that it comes from the Japanese word \u73ed\u9577 (hanch\u014d) or squad \/ team leader, and that it was borrowed by American servicemen in Japan and Korea in 1947-1953.<\/p>\n<p>However, according to <a href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/exec\/obidos\/ASIN\/0140298517\/omniglot-20\"><em>The Basque History of the World<\/em><\/a> by Mark Kurlansky, which I&#8217;m reading at the moment, the word honcho is a version of the Basque word <em>jauntxo<\/em> \/xaun\u02a7o\/, a wealthy. powerful, rural landowner &#8211; a word with a ironic, negative undertone. From <em>jaun<\/em> (sir \/ lord \/ god). This sounds kind of plausible, though I haven&#8217;t found any other sources which make the same claim.<\/p>\n<p>The book is interesting and includes quite a few bits of Basque language, and even some recipes. It is also somewhat biased in favour of the Basques.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I thought that the word honcho as in head honcho (big leader \/ big cheese) came from Japanese. The OED and the Online Etymology Dictionary both say that it comes from the Japanese word \u73ed\u9577 (hanch\u014d) or squad \/ team leader, and that it was borrowed by American servicemen in Japan and Korea in 1947-1953. [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[89,104,107,129,10,78],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6853","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-basque","category-english","category-etymology","category-japanese","category-language","category-words-and-phrases"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6853","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=6853"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6853\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6853"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6853"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6853"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}