20 June 2020
Bunk or bunkum is nonsense, gobbledygook, double-talk. This word is a case where we’re confident in how it was coined, but the precise details are illusory, probably lost to history. Bunk and bunkum are variants of the name of Buncombe County, North Carolina, and that county became associated with bloviation through its representative to the sixteenth Congress, Felix Walker.
The phrase talking to Bunkum is first recorded in the pages of the Niles Weekly Register in September 1828, and it contains the nub of the story of the term’s origin:
“TALKING TO BUNKUM!” This is an old and common saying at Washington, when a member of congress is making one of those hum-drum and unlistened to “long talks: which have lately become so fashionable—not with the hope of being heard in the house, but to afford an enlightened representative a pretence for sending a copy of his speech to his constituents, the making of many which have been paid for, as a tailor would be for making a coat, or the hatter a hat. We say his speech, for it is just as much so as his hat, and purchased with his money, if not gratuitously manufactured by the hand of a friend. This is cantly called “talking to Bunkum:” an “honorable gentleman” long ago, having said that he was not speaking to the house, but to the people of a certain county in his district, which, in local phrase, he called “Bumkum”. But these are not the only description of persons who “talk to Bunkum”—for the most intelligent and amusing, as well as the most ignorant and foolish members of legislative bodies do it—but the object of both [is] to misrepresent facts.
While this account does a fine job of defining the phrase and gives a general outline of the origin, but it is short on details as to the origin, namely when the speech in Congress occurred and who gave it.
We do have this, however, from the official History of Congress for 25 February 1820 in which Felix Walker gave or attempted to give a speech on the Missouri Question, that is whether the territory of Missouri should be admitted to the union, and if so, whether as a slave state or a free state:
Mr. WALKER, of North Carolina, rose then to address the Committee on the question; but the question was called for so clamorously and so perseveringly that Mr. W. could proceed no farther than to move the Committee rise.
The Committee refused to rise, by almost a unanimous vote.
[Rising is an arcane parliamentary procedure of the House of Representatives. The House can, if it wishes, dissolve into a committee of the whole where rules are relaxed. To rise is to adjourn the committee and return to regular order.]
There is, however, no record of what was actually said. The City of Washington Gazette on 11 May 1820 printed a copy of a speech by Walker on the Missouri Question, but doesn’t specifically indicate when the speech was given, and the text of the speech itself makes no mention of Buncombe or talking to Buncombe. Nor is there a record of the House taking up the Missouri Question in early May. It may be that Walker attempted to give this speech on or about 11 May 1820 and was shouted down because he was out of order, discussing a controversial topic that wasn’t on the agenda. Or it could be that several months after the fact this paper printed the speech that Walker had intended to give in February.
The word bunkum makes its way into American discourse within ten years, and the spelling changed as the original association with Buncombe County was lost. Here is one from The Boston Commercial Gazette of 16 February 1829:
Every one is ignorant of the plans and intentions of the President elect on this subject. The “exclusives,” as the bunkum Jackson democrats are styled by their more moderate partizans, will be sorely disappointed in regard to the distribution of offices under the administration of the old General.
It appears in the Providence Patriot (Rhode Island) on 26 May 1830 in a context far from that of politics:
“My hair is grey—but not with years.”—So says Byron’s Prisoner of Chillon—and so, on Sunday morning last, might have said the whispering woods and the sighing verdure of the fields, having been covered with a beautiful but cold drapery of frost, which was anything but “bunkum.” Vegetation it is tho’t, of some kinds, will be materially injured in the vicinity.
And a few days later it is used without quotation marks or italics in a letter to the editor by one Tom Strickland (more likely it is a letter from the editor) composed in what passes for a rustic dialect. Such dialect was a feature of newspapers of the period (see okay https://www.wordorigins.org/big-list-entries/ok-okay). Strickland is writing about a visit by two women collecting money for a battle monument on Bunker Hill:
Now do my dear jist give me five Dollars it will look so queer to se evry bodys name but mine on that long papur I shall feel ashamd cant help it says I I am stif as a moniment yes says one of the wimmin with the long papur and youre hart is as hard as Quincey grannit dont care for that says I I never new but two good things come from Quincy yet, and them the too John Adamses and they wor what I call Bunkum so of they trudged but I heard them tell my wife at the door they would call agin.
Bunkum appears in Britain by 1837, but at first in articles quoting American newspapers. From the Chester Chronicle of 3 March 1837 quoting from the New York Sunday Morning Post, but using the word in an unusual sense:
Young Durivage, the comic actor, writes and speaks as good Yankee as any man on the stage. He headed his benefit bill at Bangor with the following cute phrase:—“Our folks want to know, if your folks’ll come down to-night to see our folks, and fetch all your folks along? All the fellers must put on their yellerest vests and stiffest shirt collars, and fetch all the galls, and I’ll bet a hunk of gingerbread agin a gov of ‘lasses candy that you’ll have a bunkum time!”
And this from the London Morning Post, quoting the Pennsylvania Enquirer, on 26 February 1842:
Mr. Deford (chairman of the committee on banks) accused the gentleman from the county (Mr. M’Cahen) of speaking more for “Bunkum” than a desire to promote the public good.
The next year the Morning Post on 19 July 1843 uses the word in its own copy, but in reference to the United States. The article is penned by one Sam Slick, and there are numerous articles by him that use the word in succeeding issues of the paper:
I’ll tell you what Bunkum is. All over America, every place likes to hear of its Members of Congress, and see their speeches, and if they don’t, they send a piece to the paper, enquirin’ if their Member died a nateral death, or was skewered with a bowie knife, for they hante seen his speeches lately, and his friends are anxious to know his fate. [...] In short, almost all that’s said in Congress in the colonies, for we set the fashions to them, as Paris gals do to our milliners.) and all over America is Bunkum.
But a few months later on 11 November 1843, the Bucks Herald of Aylesbury uses it to refer to libel act that is before parliament:
In fact, the act was, and ever will be, Bunkum.
And by 1845 the word had reached Australia, as evidenced by this account of boxing match that appeared in Bell’s Life in Sydney on 20 September 1845:
The stakes were not given up for one hour, it being arranged that should Arthur come to in that time, the battle should be renewed; he did come to, but, notwithstanding all the bunkum of his most sanguine backer, he could not be persuaded to again stand to the severe butting of Billy’s “nulla nulla like cobara.
Bunkum was shortened to just bunk by the end of the century. Humorist F.P. Dunne put the word into the mouth of his character Mr. Dooley, an Irish immigrant to the United States in 1893:
That is th’ real Irish village [...] I think th’ other one from Donegal is a sort of bunk, I do, an’ I niver liked Donegal.
And humorist George Ade used it in his slang-ridden 1900 “The Fable of the Grass Widow”:
One Day a keen Business manager who thought nobody could Show him was sitting at his Desk. A Grass Widow floated in, and stood Smiling at him. She was a Blonde, and had a Gown that fit her as if she had been Packed into it by Hydraulic Pressure. She was just as Demure as Edna May ever tried to be, but the Business Manager was a Lightning Calculator, and he Surmised that the Bunk was about to be Handed to him.
So that’s the tale of bunk, a.k.a. bunkum, a rare case where we’re pretty sure of the exact coinage of a word that first appears in speech.
To add a final bit of strangeness, bunk and bunkum are etymologically unrelated to bunco, meaning a swindler or a swindle. (I remember watching old episodes of the Dragnet TV series where Sgt. Friday was working out of the Los Angeles Police Department’s bunco squad.) Bunco is from the Spanish banco, a variation on three-card monte. It’s established in English by the 1870s. But while bunco and bunk are unrelated, they undoubtedly influenced and reinforced each other over the years.
Sources:
Ade, George. “The Fable of the Grass Widow and the Mesmeree and the Six Dollars.” More Fables, Chicago: Herbert S. Stone and Company, 1900, 22.
“The Clear Grit.” Chester Chronicle, 3 March 1837, 4.
“Defamation and Libel Bill.” Bucks Herald (Aylesbury, England), 11 November 1843, 3.
“Extract of a Letter from Washington.” Boston Commercial Gazette, 16 February 1829, 4. Newsbank: America’s Historical Newspapers.
“Fight Between Black Billey, alias Young Sambo, & Mad Arthur.” Bell’s Life in Sydney and Sporting Reviewer, 20 September 1845, 3. National Library of Australia: Trove.
Green’s Dictionary of Slang, 2020, s.v. bunkum n., bunk, n.2.
“The Missouri Bill.” History of Congress, House of Representatives, 25 February 1820, 1539. Library of Congress: A Century of Lawmaking for a New Nation.
“Missouri Question: Speech of Mr. Walker of N.C.” City of Washington Gazette, 11 May 1820, 2–3.
Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. buncombe | bunkum, n., bunk, n.4., bunco, n.
Providence Patriot, 26 May 1830, 2. Gale Primary Sources: Nineteenth Century U.S. Newspapers.
Safire, William. Safire’s Political Dictionary. Oxford University Press, 2008, s.v. bunk.
“SECOND EDITION: The United States.” Morning Post (London), 26 February 1842, 5.
Slick, Sam. “BUNKUM.—“Bunkum!” Morning Post (London), 19 July 1843, 3
Strickland, Tom. “Distressing Situation” (letter to editor). Boston Courier, 31 May 1830, 1. Gale Primary Sources: Nineteenth Century U.S. Newspapers.
“Talking to Bunkum.” Niles Weekly Register, 27 September 1828, 66. HathiTrust Digital Library.