A perky word I hadn’t heard, meaning ‘having or showing a sardonic sense of humour’. Origins are mid-17th century Scots and Northern English pawk, ‘trick’. The automatic edit function, which I thought I’d switched off, keeps trying to turn this into ‘gawky’. Clearly ‘pawky’ is in danger of being filtered out of the language gene pool – please fight for its survival and use it today!
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