hokkie, noun

Origin:
AfrikaansShow more Afrikaans, hok (see hok) + diminutive suffix -ie.
1. hok sense 1. Also with distinguishing epithet, designating the kind of animal kept in the enclosure.
1960 J. Cope Tame Ox 145Go out and clean the chicken-hokkie.
1973 J. Cope Tame Ox22 Sept. 9The two geese..escaped from their hokkie early in January.
1983 J.A. Brown White Locusts 189Why don’t you go down to the hokkies and learn the pigs to read?
1983 Daily Dispatch 2 May 8 (caption)She says a bird in your hokkie is worth ten in the bundu.
1990 P. Cullinan in M. Leveson Firetalk 9‘If I find one of her pigs in the dry mill again.., I’ll shoot it!’ ‘No, Boss Skokiaan. I’ll make a nice hokkie and then they will stay in it.’
2. figurative and transferred sense. A booth or nook; a small, restricted space, a compartment.
1963 K. Mackenzie Dragon to Kill 119Tony went in through the back, past Petrus, the pleasant, intelligent Coloured youth who was now doing Abel’s work. Tony resented him sitting in Abel’s little hokkie.
1971 C.W. Eglin Informant, Cape Town, Western CapeThe government aims to keep us all in our separate ethnic hokkies.
1973 Cape Times 5 Feb. 8As a poet and a philosopher does Mr Adam Small really believe that we who have perforce to live in a separate ‘hokkie’ cannot understand him or those who are placed in hishokkie’?
1973 Radio South Africa 22 Mar. (Take a Chance)Put him in one of those klein hokkies they’ve got there.
1980 J. Scott in Cape Times 22 May 9He had allowed the SABC to persuade him to be televised in a hokkie in Cape Town while ‘ghost voices’ interrogated him from Johannesburg.
1987 S.A. Botha in Frontline Oct.Nov. 10The gomma-gomma travelled..with its load of..prisoners under the eye of a uniformed boy with an automatic weapon in his own steel hokkie in the corner.
3. figurative. hok sense 2.
1973 Cape Times 16 June 11They’ll come with bulldozers and knock down our hokkies, then we’ll have to sleep in the street.
1985 Argus 29 Aug.Susan worked as a servant and lived in a ‘hokkie’ in the yard. It was so small that she couldn’t lie down with her legs straight.
1990 Weekly Mail 30 Mar. 13Can somebody explain..to me..what this advertiser in the Cape Times has in mind? Windows...Ideal for African hokkie. R10 ea.
hok sense 1. Also with distinguishing epithet, designating the kind of animal kept in the enclosure.
A booth or nook; a small, restricted space, a compartment.
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