A reader sent in a television preview from the Daily Star for Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds in which ‘Brad Pitt leads a squad of Jewish-American soldiers on a Nazi killing spree’. The film, it added, is ‘not as funny as ’Allo ’Allo! but Pitt raises laughs out of his shonky language skills’. The reader was shocked by what she thought a crude piece of anti-Semitic vocabulary.
I am old enough to be aware of shonky as an offensive term referring to Jews, but I don’t think that was meant here. Indeed it is frequently used in the papers to mean ‘wobbly’ (as if it were wonky) or ‘ropy’. It has diverged from an Australian sense of ‘crooked, fraudulent’, though Allison Pearson said innocently in the Telegraph that her ‘new favourite phrase’ (referring to EU leaders) was ‘shonky retreads’.
In 2014 in New Zealand, a Labour candidate mocked the then prime minister, John Key, who has Jewish roots, calling him on Facebook ‘Shonky Johnkey Shylock’.
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