… that a North Carolina politician was responsible for coining a term that means “pretentious nonsense” or “claptrap”?
Safire’s Political Dictionary uses those words to help define “bunk.” Here’s how William Safire describes the word’s origin:
It is a shortening of bunkum, which is an altered shortening of Buncombe, a county in North Carolina that made up part of the district represented by Felix Walker, who sat in the House of Representatives in 1820. Walker interrupted a debate on the Missouri Compromise with a long, dull, irrelevant speech, apologizing to his impatient colleagues with the statement “I’m talking for Buncombe.”
By 1828, according to Niles’ Weekly Register, talking to (or for) Buncombe was well known.
The shortened version “bunk” emerged later in the 19th century, and politicians have been offering examples of it ever since.
