The open thread for night owls is up with a title on “debunking.” Which, of course, has nothing to do with rousing anyone from bed, but dispelling falsehood. But how does one get “bunked” to begin with?
I always used to chuckle when reading the name of the North Carolina county of which Asheville is the seat. GF would ask what was so funny about Buncombe County. I pointed out how the county was a homonym for the word meaning nonsense. Then I learned that it wasn’t a homonym at all, but the word for nonsense is the actual name of that lovely county.
It all goes back to Felix Walker, who was the United States congressman from the region in 1820. During the long and heated debate over whether the territory of Missouri should be admitted to the union as slave state or free state, Walker rose in the House chamber and, just before the vote, began a long-winded speech touching on every aspect of the question.
His colleagues impatiently shouted Walker down, saying other speakers had already covered his points. Walker replied that he was not speaking for the benefit of the Congress, but “for Buncombe."
Thus did Mr. Walker’s home county become a slang term, originally confined to Washington, DC, meaning pointless poltical blather and eventually spelled “bunkum.” Many dictionaries cite “hokum” as a derivation and, though I can find no authority, I believe “hooey” derived from “hokum,” as the meanings are the same and they both showed up in the language at the the same time.
Surprisingly, “bunkum” and “bunk,” which can mean falsehoods as well as silliness, are not related to “bunco” or “bunko,” meaning a cheat or swindle. That word comes from a game played with cards or dice, originally called “Eight Dice Cloth” adapted for cards with similar rules to the Spanish game banka (known in Mexico as Monte Bank). The game became very popular in the American west, where gambling dens became known as “bunco parlors” and “bunco artists” were crooked dealers, soon to include swindlers of all kinds, who’d best look out for the local police department’s “bunco squad."