The one thing we can be sure of in the next four weeks is a lot of bumf: bumf through our letter boxes, bumf in our inboxes, and virtual bumf on our airwaves as campaigners take to the soapbox. At times it will feel entirely fitting that this word started life in military slang where it was short for “bumfodder”, i.e. toilet paper. Throwaway promises and dispensable soundbites are coming our way in spades (or on shovels), but thankfully the thesaurus is here with a shedload of terms for quatsch, codswallop, and to borrow fittingly from Boris Johnson, the “inverted pyramid of piffle”.
At the heart of “nonsense” of course is that it makes no sense, just as a “disease” makes us feel ill at ease. The latter may be a regular response to the incoming bloviators, or blowers of hot air, and it won’t be just the politicians. As election fever takes hold our feeds will be bulging with “ultracrepidarians”, those who love to hold forth on subjects they know absolutely nothing about. The result? More hokum, hooey, and utter humbug.
It used to strike me as curious that meaningless piffle is couched so often in terms of food, until I learned that the earliest meaning of “mess” was an unappetising mush of broth, porridge, or boiled vegetables (that link survives, with improved menus, we hope, in the “officer’s mess”.) “Balderdash”, similarly would have been known to Shakespeare as a frothy concoction of milk and beer, with the occasional quicklime and pigeon’s dung thrown in.
“Flummery”, meaningless or insincere schmoozing that makes a nice alliterative pairing with fiddle-faddle and flimflam, was a blancmange-style pudding whose name may come from the Welsh llymru, “soft and slippery”.
We can take a near-literal pop at “codswallop”, said to be a nod to the soft drinks’ maker Hiram Codd, who successfully patented a glass bottle sealed with a ball in its neck. His drinks didn’t fare quite so well, and came to be viewed as the poor relations of real “wallop”, i.e. beer. The story is certainly colourful, but the more plausible inspiration for one of our favourite nonsense words is the 19th century “cod walloper”, a dealer in fish. Fishiness and suspicion have never been far apart.
Then we have “hogwash”, thankfully not designed for drinking, at least by humans. In the Middle Ages, it was used for kitchen swill for pigs. Best leave any political pig connections there.
Of course, nonsense has had its audience throughout the ages. Think of the mountebanks (literally, “bench-mounters”) who would stand on a platform at 16th-century markets and proclaim the wonders of their medicinal wares. One of their more bizarre stunts involved asking their assistant to swallow a toad, believed to be highly poisonous, and then promptly “curing” them with their bogus potions. Today’s “toadying” followers of a spurious cause, prepared to swallow anything, have those early scammers to thank.
Speaking of fraud, our 15th century ancestors seem remarkably prescient for coining “trumpery” to describe “trickery” and “deceit”. Among gardeners, it also described any weed that hindered the growth of valuable plants. A hundred years later, “trumperiness” had become the new catchword for anything flashy but worthless.
It’s almost as though we’ve always needed words for bosh (from the Turkish for “empty”), “flapdoodle” (it sounded good), and claptrap (designed to elicit applause). Linguistic jiggery-pokery may have begun with professional magicians, but it has successfully branched out to those wishing to sprinkle fairy dust on a different stage. In the case of “bunkum”, that stage was the US Congress, when in 1820 the member for Buncombe County in North Carolina stood up to deliver a rambling and inconsequential speech near the close of a debate, despite attempts by his colleagues to cut him off. The congressman carried on, and on, declaring he was obliged to “make a speech for Buncombe”. What he unwittingly made was an enduring byword for political baloney.
Of course, it would be wrong to imagine that everything we hear before election day should be roundly dismissed as twaddle. The historical dictionary is curiously, and some would say unfairly, lacking in positive epithets for political pledges. It is telling that there is no current adjective to accompany the noun “integrity” (“integritive” lived and died in the 18th century). But it will be our job to sift through the bafflegab and extract those promises we can trust. At the heart of the word “election” is the Latin “picking out”, after all.
Whilst we do, we will put up with any persistent poppycock, an expressive borrowing from Dutch which means either “soft shit” or “doll’s poo”. Whichever version you prefer, you will at least have the bumfodder to deal with it.
Susie Dent is a lexicographer and etymologist. She has appeared in Dictionary Corner on Countdown since 1992, and co-hosts with Gyles Brandreth the podcast Something Rhymes with Purple