Wednesday's Random Slang-o-rama: Bunkum/Bunk

If something is described as "so much bunkum" (or conversely, if someone says, "What a load of bunk!"), nonsense is the order of the day. It turns out that the expression has a 19th century history. Which of course, I will share with you below....

>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
The Online Etymology Dictionary has this to say about bunkum/bunk:

BUNK: "nonsense," 1900, short for bunkum, phonetic spelling of Buncombe, a county in North Carolina. The usual story (attested by 1841) of its origin is this: At the close of the protracted Missouri statehood debates in the U.S. Congress, supposedly on Feb. 25, 1820, North Carolina Rep. Felix Walker (1753-1828) began what promised to be a "long, dull, irrelevant speech," and he resisted calls to cut it short by saying he was bound to say something that could appear in the newspapers in the home district and prove he was on the job. "I shall not be speaking to the House," he confessed, "but to Buncombe." Thus Bunkum has been American English slang for "nonsense" since 1841 (it is attested from 1838 as generic for "a U.S. Representative's home district").

Grammarist, Idiom Origins, Collins Dictionary, and others agree with the above. But hey! A discussion of an interesting (fanciful!) alternative history of this word's origin appears in a 2006 post on the Language Log of University of Pennsylvania. The post is titled The Bunkum of the "Bunkum of Bunkum."  Fun to read, but... beware!... because.... bunkum!

Take note: Before 1900, it's bunkum, not bunk...
Image by Prawny from Pixabay

Wednesday's Random Slang-o-rama: Mumpsimus

 

I'll bet everyone has at least one mumpsimus they must contend with, especially in these days of wide-spread discord and misinformation...

>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>

If you know someone who is stubborn, who refuses to change their mind despite being proven wrong, then you know—yes, you guessed it—a mumpsimus. The Little Book of Lost Words by Joe Gillard provides this definition along with a "first appearance" date of the 16th century. So let's see what else we can uncover about this word that so very aptly applies to an unfortunately large portion of humanity.

World Wide Words has a fun entry on mumpsimus, including this possible origin story:

... According to the tale, there was once a medieval monk who persistently said a phrase in the Latin Eucharist wrongly, either because he was illiterate and had learned it that way or because it had been transcribed incorrectly in his copy. Instead of “quod in ore sumpsimus”, he would say "quod in ore mumpsimus". Now sumpsimus is Latin for "we have taken" (the full phrase means "which we have taken into the mouth"), but mumpsimus is just nonsense.

 What made this particular mistake memorable is what the monk was supposed to have said when he was corrected. According to the version of the incident told in 1517 by Richard Pace, later the Dean of St Paul’s Cathedral in London, the monk replied that he had said it that way for forty years and "I will not change my old mumpsimus for your new sumpsimus".

WWW adds that this story may have been an oft-told joke in medieval times, and that the word was first recorded in 1530 in a book by William Tyndale, the first translator of the Bible into English, called The Practice of Prelates. I hustled over to Google Books, and sure enough, found a digital version of an 1849 edition of this book from the 1530s (talk about hopscotching through the centuries!). I chased down the word and the story right here. 

According to WWW, Wikipedia, and Merriam-Webster, mumpsimus can also describe this wrong-headed behavior or custom. WWW notes that mumpsimus was given royal approval in 1545, when Henry VIII referred to it in a speech: "Some be too stiff in their old mumpsimus, others be too busy and curious in their sumpsimus."

So, next time you hear someone say they refuse to get vaccinated against COVID-19 because, oh, the vaccine's got a microchip in it or it'll make them magnetic or some other such bunk, you know what word you can employ...

Possible treatment for mumpsimus?
By Internet Archive Book Images - https://www.flickr.com/photos/internetarchivebookimages/14766331541/Source book page: https://archive.org/stream/opiereadinozarks00read/opiereadinozarks00read#page/n22/mode/1up, No restrictions, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=44146520