hanky panky (hanky-panky)
noun, informal humorous

- unacceptable or dishonest behaviour, especially involving sexual activity or money.

Cambridge Dictionary

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ORIGIN

This is one of those curious terms that was just made up as having an attractive alliteration or rhyme. The words themselves have no inherent meaning, although it’s possible that ‘hanky-panky’ is a variant of ‘hoky-poky’ or ‘hocus-pocus’.

The term is first recorded, in the sense of ‘trickery’), in the first edition of ‘Punch, or the London Charivari’, Vol 1, in September 1841:

“Only a little hanky-panky, my lud. The people likes it; they loves to be cheated before their faces. One, two, three - presto - begone. I’ll show your ludship as pretty a trick of putting a piece of money in your eye and taking it out of your elbow, as you ever beheld.”

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The second meaning, which the Oxford English Dictionary lists as “Sexual activity or dalliance, especially of a surreptitious nature” has been with us since the middle of the 20th century, as here from George Bernard Shaw’s play Geneva, 1939:

She: No hanky panky. I am respectable; and I mean to keep respectable.
He: I pledge you my word that my intentions are completely honorable.

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In the early 1960s Elene Vis, ex-bordello manager, opened The HANKY PANKY School for “ladies of pleasure”. Her aim? To teach them to become so good at entertaining their customers that they can retire early.  “You can teach women how to earn more money by becoming more attractive,” she explained. “That was how Cinderella did it. The prince didn’t fall in love with her while she was wearing her working clothes.”

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SYNONYMS
for hanky-panky

Trickery: artifice, chicane, chicanery, deception, devilry, dirty/funny/monkey business, double-dealing, fraud, jiggery-pokery, knavery, machinations, mischief, sharp practice, shenanigans, skullduggery, subterfuge, wile

Amorous: a thing, affair of the heart, amour, courtship, dalliance, entanglement, fling, flirtation, fooling around, forbidden love, hokey-pokey, liaison, love affair, romance, tryst

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"These expense accounts just don't make sense - do you think that some HANKY PANKY is going on?"

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