“Stonkered,” “Stonking”

Some time ago, I was reading an American friend’s Facebook post. He was remembering when, decades back, “I was at my folks’ apartment and put on [the album] Blonde on Blonde. My father said, ‘Take off that garbage.’ I stared at him, utterly stonkered.” For such a productive group of words, “stonkered” and its variants are quite new. The OED‘s first citation is for the verb “stonker,” meaning to kill or destroy a person or thing. The quote is from the Anzac Bulletin in 1917: “Without a gun in their hands the Diggers just went for them and stonkered the lot, except one whom they brought in prisoner.” Anzac refers to the Australian and New Zealand forces in World War I, and for three decades or so, the word was the exclusive province of Down Under, even as it developed new meanings: Exhausted: “It’s this rotten pack. By heaven, I’m feeling stonkered! Where the Hell’s Our Camp?” Aussie: Australian Soldiers Magazine, 1918 Intoxicated: “”There is a difference between a man who is either…