What A Load of Bunk! (minicast)

Welcome to the summer podcast edition of A Way with Words. I’m Martha Barnette. My co-host Grant Barrett is off showing his baby boy Guthrie how to build his very own website.

Hey Grant, if you’re listening, I see where the domain name cutestbabyinthewholewideuniverse.com is still available. A lot of you write to us here at A Way with Words asking us to debunk this or that linguistic question, but what about the word debunk itself? Where do we get such a strange word? Well, it’s an interesting story, but to understand it, you have to dial the time machine back all the way to 1820.

Now, at that time, there was a debate raging in Congress. The question was, should they admit Missouri, which was a slave state, to the Union? And ultimately, this big debate resulted in the so-called Missouri Compromise, which I’m sure you remember from history class, right?

In any case, that week, debating on the House floor was one Felix Walker. Now, Walker was a congressman from North Carolina. He represented the western part of that state. It was a district that included towns like Asheville in Buncombe County. Now, that’s Buncombe County, North Carolina. B-U-N-C-O-M-B-E. Remember that.

And when Walker’s turn came to speak, he started talking. And then he talked some more. And then he talked some more. And then he got off the subject and started talking about all these other things. And he just kept on talking and talking and talking. And finally, his irritated colleagues begged him to stop. At which point, Walker stopped just long enough to say, I am talking for bunkum.

You see, he was just putting on a show for the folks back home. And thanks to Walker, the phrase talking to Buncombe quickly entered the language. It became a synonym for that kind of political bloviating. And over time, that slang word was re-spelled as Buncombe, more simple. And over time, that slang word was simplified to B-U-N-K-U-M, Buncombe. And by the turn of the century, people had shortened the word still to simply just bunk, B-U-N-K.

Then in 1923, a guy named William E. Woodward, he was a former ad man who had become a novelist, Woodward published a novel that he called Bunk. And in it, he proposed a new term, debunk. And what he said in the book was, debunking simply means taking the bunk out of things.

So you see, from Buncombe County to the halls of Congress to an ad man’s novel to our show, the word debunk has traveled a long, long way. Now, if you’ve heard a linguistic story that you think needs debunking, we’d love to hear from you. Just go ahead and ask us if ship high in transit ever became an acronym. We’ll debunk that one right away.

You can write to us at words at kpbs.org. Thanks for tuning in to A Way with Words. I’m Martha Barnette, and that’s no bunk.

Support for A Way with Words comes from ThinkMap, maker of the Visual Thesaurus, an interactive dictionary and thesaurus. The Visual Thesaurus brings language to life. Learn more at visualthesaurus.com. Bye.