Talking Bunk

The famous tourist town of Asheville, NC, also serves as the seat of Buncombe County, one of the few counties in the United States whose name has passed into the English language.

Here's how it happened: in February 1820, at the end of a rancorous debate over the admission of Missouri as a state, NC congressman Felix Walker, a Revolutionary War veteran, rose to give a particularly rambling, inconclusive speech completely unrelated to the issue at hand, and focused upon a topic only of any conceivable interest to a few folks back home in his home county.  Pressed to explain his actions, Walker explained that he was not actually talking to the people in the room, but to the Congressional record--and the newspapers back home. "I shall not be speaking to the House," he explained, "but to Buncombe."

Thereafter, whenever a congressman's mouth ran ahead of his thoughts, he might well be asked if he, too, was "talking to Buncombe."

The term "talking bunkum" had become synonymous with empty rhetoric by the 1840s. As early as the start of the 20th century, the phrase had morphed into "talking bunk," and can be found in the public statements of such luminaries as Henry Ford.