Reader Comment

An email from Byter Dianne, a friend who used to live in Australia but now resides in Holland, the country of her birth (and mine too): 

Dear Otto 

It looks a bit wonky to me too but they are all so beautiful. 

Is Wonky an Australian word?? [Didn’t check it on Google but sounds Aussie.] 

Take care 

Dianne

Dianne was referring to my enquiry yesterday as to whether a pic of a wedding cake looked wonky to anyone else.

It's funny how a word that is in common usage in your own neck of the words turns out to be unknown elsewhere. I had the same experience when I looked up the origin of the word “Ta” for “thank you”, only to find that its use in that context is confined mainly to Australia and, to a lesser degree, in England.  I was also surprised that it is commonly thought of as a child's word. It was much more commonplace when I was a nipper than it is now. 

As regards “wonky”: 

According to Wiktionary, it has the following meanings: 

1. (chiefly UK, Australia, New Zealand) lopsided, misaligned or off centre (the context in which I used it) 

2. (chiefly UK, Australia, New Zealand) feeble, shaky or rickety 

3. (computing) suffering from intermittent bugs; broken 

4. (generally) incorrect 

From Grammarphobia: 

A wonky question 

AUGUST 31ST, 2007  

Q: I’m reading an Angela Thirkell novel, High Rising, and one of the characters (young Tony Morland) repeatedly uses the term “wonky” to mean nutty or neurotic. Can you tell me more about the origin of this word? 

A: Both The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (4th ed.) and Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (11th ed.) say “wonky” is chiefly British and means shaky, unsteady, or awry. But I think many Americans use the word these days to mean overly studious or obsessed with details – that is, wonkish or nerdy. 

The first reference for “wonky” in the Oxford English Dictionary is a 1919 citation in which Lord Northcliffe, a newspaper magnate, writes of being “weak, and wonky, as the telephone girls say, after a bad morning with the subscribers.” 

When Angela Thirkell wrote High Rising in the early 1930s, “wonky” was well established as an adjective to describe an unstable or unsound person or thing. Kipling, in his last collection of stories, Limits and Renewals (1932), refers to a wonky headlight. And Edgar Wallace, in his novel The Strange Countess (1925), refers to financial accounts “that went a little wonky.” 

But where does “wonky” come from? American Heritage suggests that it may be derived from the Old English wordwancol, meaning unsteady or insecure. 

As for the noun “wonk,” it first appeared in print in 1929, according to the OED, and has had various meanings over the years, including a useless naval hand, a white person, and an effeminate man. 

Fred Shapiro, editor of The Yale Book of Quotations, has traced the use of “wonk” for a studious or hard-working person to a 1954 article in Time magazine. He says the usage may have originated at Harvard, where students were called wonks, preppies, or jocks, according to a 1962 article in Sports Illustrated. 

The use of “wonk” or “wonkish” to refer to someone obsessed with minute points of policy is relatively recent. The first published reference in the OED is from a 1992 Washington Post article that refers to “a lot of wonkish material” (targeted tax cuts, community policing, education reform). 

One apparently dubious suggestion is that “wonk” is “know” spelled backwards. Another is that “wonk” is related to the slang term “wanker,” meaning masturbator. A third is that it’s derived from Willy Wonka, Roald Dahl’s eccentric chocolate maker. 

http://www.grammarphobia.com/blog/2007/08/a-wonky-question.html

“A person who has good thoughts cannot ever be ugly. You can have a wonky nose and a crooked mouth and a double chin and stick-out teeth, but if you have good thoughts they will shine out of your face like sunbeams and you will always look lovely.” 

- Roald Dahl