vocabulary: punky ?

[hela]

Dear teachers,

In the following paragraph should the word "puky" be "punky" instead? Thank you for your help.

At my school they taught you a bit of French, but anyone who attempted to pronounce a world correctly was laughed down. On a trip to Calais we attacked a Frog behind a restaurant. By this ignorance we knew ourselves to be superior to the public-school kids, with their puky uniforms and leather briefcases, and Mummy and daddy waiting outside in the car to pick them up. We were rougher; we disrupted all lessons; we were fighters; we never carried no effeminate briefcases since we never did no homework. We were proud of never learning anything except the names of footballers, the personnel of rock groups and the lyrics of “I am a walrus”.

Hela

[Tdol]

Puky- sounds fine to me- their uniforms made the narrator want to puke (vomit). Public (private) schools don't have punky uniforms.

[MrPedantic]

Also, the reference to "I am the Walrus" (1967) suggests a period that predates punk (1976/77).

(It's true that "punk" also refers to a certain style of mid-60s American music; but it's very unlikely that "punky" in a mid-60s US sense would appear in a British text of this kind.)

MrP

[hela]

Thank you for these clarifications