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

Bunking and Debunking

It’s awfully tempting to think that debunking has something to do with bunk beds. One imagines that a false idea is found snoozing under a duvet, is woken up and thrown out of his bunk bed by big, burly reason. This is, alas, nonsense.

Debunking is the process of getting rid of an idea that is bunk or bunkum. Bunkum, as we all know, is complete and utter nonsense, but it’s also a place in North Carolina. Buncombe County is in the west of the state, a rather pretty and rural area that became a byword for claptrap.

In 1820 the Congress of the United States was debating the Missouri Question. The Missouri Question was to do with slavery and the answer turned out to be the Missouri Compromise. Towards the end of the debate a Congressman called Felix Walker stood up, cleared his throat, began to speak, and wouldn’t stop.

He went on and on until people started to get fidgety, and on and on until people started to get annoyed, and on and on until people started to jeer, and on and on until people started to tap him on the shoulder and tell him to stop, and on and on until there was a small crowd round him demanding to know why he wouldn’t stop.

Felix Walker replied that he was not speaking to Congress, his speech was for the benefit of his constituency back home: he was making ‘a speech for Buncombe’.

You see, Felix Walker didn’t care about the Missouri Question or the Missouri Compromise: he cared about the press coverage he would get among the voters in his own constituency. It was such an ingenious idea (and such a common practice in all democracies) that the phrase caught on, and speaking to Buncombe soon got shortened to speaking bunkum and then just plain bunkum, which needs to be debunked.

It’s worthwhile mentioning that though that’s the usual story, there’s an alternative version in which a Congressman wandered in and found Felix Walker addressing an utterly empty chamber. He asked Walker what the hell he was doing and Walker explained that he was speaking to Buncombe (no doubt a copy of the speech would be mailed home). I prefer this version, but it’s less likely to be true. Either way, bunkum remains talk that serves no actual purpose, and is definitely down to the place in North Carolina.

Poor Buncombe County! Consigned to the dictionary as a byword for nonsense, Edward Buncombe must be turning in his grave.

Edward Buncombe was a British chap who was born in St Kitt’s but moved to America when he inherited a great big plantation in Carolina. He was one of the first fellows in the area to join the pro-independence movement, and when the Revolutionary War broke out in 1775 he joined the Continental Army and was wounded at the Battle of Germantown. He would probably have recovered were it not that one night he got out of bed and sleepwalked to the top of a flight of stairs, toppled down, and died from his re-opened wounds.

In his will he left over two thousand acres of plantation, and ten negroes. He was such a hero that a few years later Buncombe County was named in his honour. So really it’s Edward Buncombe whose name is in debunked. Or you can go further.

Edward Buncombe must, somehow or other, have been a descendant of Richard de Bounecombe who lived in Somerset in the early fourteenth century. Bounecombe itself means reedy (boune) valley (combe). Combe is one of the very few words in Old English that comes from Celtic. Why there are so few is a great mystery, and it all depends on how nasty the Anglo-Saxons were.