The Etymologicon: A Circular Stroll through the Hidden Connections of the English Language

Hoax Bodies

Let us finish our tour of the human body with the Latin word for the whole thing: corpus. It’s pretty obvious how this word gave us corpse and corporal punishment. It’s a lot less obvious how it gave us words for magic and fraud. To explain that we’ll have to go back to a certain supper that took place in Jerusalem in around 33 AD.

Funny chap, Jesus. First, it’s a little strange to assert that a piece of bread is your body. If you or I tried that we wouldn’t be believed. We certainly wouldn’t be allowed to run a bakery. Yet, given that Jesus was the son of God,[17] we’ll just have to take him at his word.

What’s odd is the cannibalistic non-sequitur. If Jesus had said, ‘Take, eat; this is plain old bread and not human flesh’, then the sentence would make sense. As it is, Jesus tells his disciples, ‘This is not bread, this is human flesh. What’s more, it’s my flesh. Now eat it up like good little cannibals.’

It’s enough to make you curious.

Christianity’s cannibalism is something so central to Western culture that it often escapes our notice. During the crusades, the Muslims got rather worried about it. Nobody was sure how far the Christian’s cannibalism went, and rumours spread around the Near East of Muslims being cooked and eaten. When the Christians tried to explain that they only ate God, they just seemed to be adding blasphemy to their sins.

You were meant to take the cannibalism literally, as well. At the time, a Christian could be burnt at the stake for denying the literal truth of transubstantiation. The communion wafer was actually turned into Jesus’ flesh. All that remained of the original wafer were what theologians called the accidentals. The accidentals were those qualities that meant that the wafer still looked, smelled, felt and tasted like a wafer. Other than that it was wholly transformed.

This change was effected by the priest taking the wafer and saying the magic words: ‘Hoc est corpus meum: this is my body.’

And then in the sixteenth century Protestantism happened. This new form of Christianity asserted, among other things, that the wafer did not turn into Jesus’ flesh but merely represented it.

Rather than behaving like gentlemen and agreeing to differ, the Protestants and Catholics got into an awful spat about whether the wafer was or wasn’t the Lord’s flesh, and did all sorts of things like burning each other, attaching each other to racks and making jokes at each other’s expense.

In the court of the Protestant King James I, there was a clown who used to perform comical magic tricks, during which he would intone the cod-magical words: Hocus Pocus. Indeed, the clown called himself His Majesty’s Most Excellent Hocus Pocus, and the phrase caught on. Where did it come from?

From the body to cannibalism to religion to magic: corpus has come a long way, but it still has a long way to go. Hocus pocus got shortened to hoax.

The words of Jesus had been translated, parodied, shortened, and now they meant an outright, barefaced con. And it didn’t stop there. Hoax got changed again: not shortened this time, but lengthened. Hoax became hokum, an American phrase meaning nonsense or rubbish or bunkum. In fact, it probably gained its –kum in order to make it sound more like bunkum.

Now, does bunkum relate to bunk beds, golfing bunkers, or reedy valleys?