10 Words Derived From Places In America - 500 Words Ep. 26

It seems we’re always late to the party here at HaggardHawks. Yes, it was July 4 last Monday but, hey—what can you do? 

So. A very belated Happy Independence Day to anyone reading this over in the States, and in honour (or rather honor) of your celebrations, this week on the HH YouTube channel we’re looking at 10 places in the United States that somehow ended up in the dictionary. Dinner jackets. Outdoor symposiums. Endless, mind-numbing political speeches. Frankly, it’s all here.

One little bit of linguistic Americana that didn’t make the final cut this week, however, is hooch.

As a slang term for alcohol—and in particular homemade or rough quality alcohol—the word hooch first appeared in the language in the late nineteenth century. It derives from the name of the Hoochinoo, a tribe of Tlingit Native Americans based on Admiralty Island in the far southeast of Alaska. And as they knew all too well, if there’s one thing guaranteed to keep you warm on a cold southeast Alaskan night, it’s home-brewed alcohol. Apparently. 

The Hoochinoo had long manufactured their own liquor, but when the Klondike Gold Rush brought 100,000 prospectors to the region in mid-1890s, they realised they had the perfect captive audience. Before long, they were making a considerable profit selling their alcoholic beverages to the prospectors hoping to strike it rich in the Yukon—and to the prospectors, the name Hoochinoo, and eventually the reduced form hooch, came to be their byword of choice for potent, homebrewed booze. (Booze, incidentally, is another story for another day…)

As for the Hoochinoo themselves, they took their name from a local Tlingit word, Hutsnuwu, literally meaning “grizzly bear fort”, thought to be either the name of one of the tribe’s settlements on the island, or else a local name for the island itself. All of which makes hooch the perfect geographical accompaniment to your tuxedo, your Denver boots and, of course, absolute bunkum. 

Bunkum

The fact that there’s any kind of etymological connection between politics and long-winded speeches (or, for that matter, between politics and a word meaning “complete nonsense”) might come as little surprise. But the fact is that bunkum owes its existence to a tediously lengthy political speech delivered by US Congressman Felix Walker in 1820.

Born in Virginia in 1753, Walker was elected to Congress in 1817 as representative for Buncombe County, North Carolina. He spent a total of six years in the House, during which time Congress was tasked with debating the so-called Missouri Question—namely, whether the territory of Missouri should be admitted into the Union as a free or a slave state—in late 1819.

The debate rumbled on for several inconclusive months, until finally, just before the decisive vote was due to be taken, Congressman Walker stood to address the house on 25 February 1820. 

He went on to deliver a lengthy, rambling, and largely irrelevant 5,000-word speech—which, thanks to the wonders of the Internet, you can now torture yourself with here; to put that into perspective, Walker’s speech is around 1,000 words longer than the entire role of Hamlet. 

Felix Walker, inventor of the cure for insomnia

Walker’s speech went on and on and on. And on. And on. His exasperated colleagues repeatedly shouted him down and yelled at him to desist, but, undeterred, he continued talking and proudly explained that he was not, “speaking to the House, but to Buncombe.” 

Out of everything that he said that day, it was this pithy explanation that proved to be the most significant. Soon, saying or doing something “for Buncombe” slipped into American slang to mean “doing something purely to please other people”, and the mid-1800s, it was being so widely used that its original spelling Buncombe was lost, and it was the newly-simplified bunkum that ultimately became a byword for political claptrap, empty promises, and eventually utter nonsense. 

The clipped form bunk followed in the early 1900s, and we’ve been debunking things since 1923. 

Felix Walker, meanwhile, is now commemorated on a plaque in his home county of Buncombe for, quite rightly, giving a “new meaning to the word.”