This is My County!
15 December 2007 - 7 טבת 5768 by Huw
The recent arrest of my (former) county sheriff on charges of running a protection racket for illegal slot machines… amply explains how bunkum comes from the name of my county.
bunkum
Origin: 1819
A congressman from western North Carolina was so mindful of the voters in his home county that he inadvertently made its name a household word. It was the Honorable Felix Walker, Representative from the county that includes Asheville, North Carolina, who in 1819 (or perhaps 1820) justified his longwinded remarks on the nearly deserted House floor by saying that his constituents had elected him “to make a speech for Buncombe.”That was all it took. Evidently the country was in need of a word more colorful than nonsense for the rantings and ramblings of politicians and boosters. With the disrespectfully simplified spelling bunkum, the word soon established itself in the jargon of politics. “Talking to Bunkum!” exclaimed an article in 1828. “This is an old and common saying at Washington, when a member of congress is making one of those humdrum and unlistened to ‘long talks’ which have lately become so fashionable.”
Meanwhile, there came into existence around the same time another bunkum meaning just the opposite: “excellent, outstanding.” Starting in 1834, we find bunkum candy and cakes, a Buncombe fence, and a bunkum politician–supposedly a first-rate one. These two opposite meanings for one word made it exceptionally useful by allowing a speaker to damn with seeming praise.
Later developments accentuated the negative implications of the word. In the 1870s, a San Francisco gambler introduced a new game with the Spanish name banco. When it was discovered that the banco dice were loaded, the first vowel was humorously changed to suggest an affinity with bunkum. Soon enough bunco came to stand for any kind of swindle.
By 1900 a further shortening had reduced bunkum to modern bunk, ready for application to the plentiful nonsense of the twentieth century, as in Henry Ford’s famous “History is bunk.” And in 1923 the author of a book about bunk felt the need to coin a word for getting rid of it: debunk.
